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SHARING IN CREATION 


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SHARING IN CREA 


IN CAL AAD 
STUDIES IN THE 
CHRISTIAN VIEW OF THE WORLD 


“Tf Christianity needs to make itself at 
home, as is often said in the modern world, 
the modern world needs even more desperately 
to make itself at home in Christianity.” 





THE Monin LECTURES, 1925 


BY 
W. COSBY BELL, D.D. 


PROFESSOR OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 
VIRGINIA THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 


New York 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1925 
All rights reserved 


Coprriaut, 1925, 
Bry THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 


Set up and electrotyped. 
Published September, 1925. 


Printed in the United States of America by 
THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK. 


To 
MY WIFE 
ANNA LEE BELL 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/sharingincreatio0Obell 


FOREWORD 


THE JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP 


John Bohlen, who died in Philadelphia on the 
twenty-sixth day of April, 1874, bequeathed to trus- 
tees a fund of one hundred thousand dollars, to be 
distributed to religious and charitable objects in ac- 
cordance with the well-known wishes of the testator. 

By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, the 
trustees under the will of Mr. Bohlen transferred 
and paid over to ““The Rector, Church Wardens, and 
Vestrymen of the Church of the Holy Trinity, 
Philadelphia,’”’ in trust, a sum of money for certain 
designated purposes, out of which fund the sum of 
ten thousand dollars was set apart for the endow- 
ment of The John Bohlen Lectureship, upon the 
following terms and conditions: 





The money shall be invested in good sub- 
stantial and safe securities, and held in trust 
for a fund to be called The John Bohlen Lec- 
tureship, and the income shall be applied an- 
nually to the payment of a qualified person, 
whether clergyman or layman, for the delivery 
and publication of at least one hundred copies 
of two or more lecture sermons. These Lec- 
tures shall be delivered at such time and place, 
in the city of Philadelphia, as the persons nomi- 
nated to appoint the lecturer shall from time 

7 


8 FOREWORD 


to time determine, giving at least six months’ 
notice to the person appointed to deliver the 
same, when the same may conveniently be 
done, and in no case selecting the same person 
as lecturer a second time within a period of five 
years. The payment shall be made to said 
lecturer, after the lectures have been printed 
and received by the trustees, of all the income 
for the year derived from said fund, after defray- 
ing the expense of printing the lectures and the 
other incidental expenses attending the same. 


The subject of such lectures shall be such 
as is within the terms set forth in the will of 
the Rev. John Bampton, for the delivery of 
what are known as the “Bampton Lectures,’ at 
Oxford, or any other subject distinctly connec- 
ted with or relating to the Christian Religion. 


The lecturer shall be appointed annually 
in the month of May, or as soon thereafter as 
can conveniently be done, by the persons who 
for the time being shall hold the offices of Bishop 
of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the 
Diocese in which is the Church of the Holy 
Trinity, the Rector of said Church, the Pro- 
fessor of Biblical Learning, the Professor of 
Systematic Divinity, and the Professor of 
Ecclesiastical History, in the Divinity School of 
the Protestant Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. 

In case either of said offices are vacant, the 
others may nominate the lecturer. 


Under this trust the Rev. W. Cosby Bell, D.D., 
was appointed to deliver the lectures for the year 1925. 


PREFACE 





I have read somewhere a piece of advice to 
theologians to the effect that they are more fruit- 
fully occupied when dealing with problems within 
the world than when they essay to deal with the 
problem of the world. And, indeed, the mind works 
more easily and with less sense of strain at problems 
of practice than at the problem of meanings. But 
if the above advice is disregarded in these lectures, 
it is because of the conviction that what one shall 
think of the details of life and how one shall act in 
its particular situations depends very largely upon 
one’s view of the world as a whole. It is not the 
theologian or the philosopher, but Life itself that 
raises the problem of the meaning of life; it is always 
coming to us with the question that Jesus put to his 
disciples, ‘‘Whom say ye that I am?’’; and, in words 
or in deeds, we can not avoid giving an answer. 
And any attempt to find the right answer in words 
should be only a step towards finding the right 
answer in deeds. 


These lectures represent an effort to suggest 
some of the outlines of such a basic philosophy of 
life. , They make no special claim to originality; 
there is nothing in them of importance which has 
not been said or suggested elsewhere on an ampler 
scale. Nor do they represent any effort at complete- 

9 


10 PREFACE 


ness; there are many important questions visibly 
left to one side. Rather are they an attempt to sug- 
gest in the briefest and simplest fashion possible 
some of the main features of a view of the world that 
results when one attempts to bring contemporary 
knowledge and thought into relation with the 
Christian religion. And they are written in the 
conviction that in such commerce and interchange 
between what we have always known and what we 
have more recently learned lies the only hope of any 
fuller understanding of either. If Christianity needs 
to make itself at home, as is so often said, in the 
modern world, the modern world needs even more 
desperately to make itself at home in Christianity. 
Religion can get along after a fashion without a great 
deal of knowledge and still breed faithful and useful 
living in the world; but knowledge, grown irreligious 
and undutiful, might well become an agent of de- 
struction. Knowledge is power, but power is an 
indeterminate thing until it is settled to what ends 
it shall be used. And knowledge that has not 
learned to serve the highest ends of the world raay 
be no blessing but only a scourge. 

The lectures record the further conviction ‘Gat 
any better religious understanding of the world must 
be sought along lines openly and confessedly Chris- 
tian. Many of the questions dealt with are such as 
would have come under the old heading of “‘Natural 
Theology,’ understood as the effort to construct a 
philosophy of the world without the aid of “Revela- 
tion.’ But surely all that is “natural” is also 
revealed and all that is ‘“‘revealed” is but the very 
climax and culmination of the natural. And while 


PREFACE 11 


the attempt can be made—no doubt usefully—to 
interpret the world as far as may be without bringing 
into play the characteristic Christian data, such a 
proceeding can not but be, for the Christian teacher 
and student, a highly artificial one. To discuss the 
purpose of the world without using the meanings that 
have come to us through the Incarnation, to discuss 
the problem of suffering without using the light that 
falls upon it from the cross—that is as if one sought 
to open the door without using the key. It might 
even be urged with some force, that “Natural 
Theology” has been an anachronism for nineteen 
hundred years. If Jesus Christ be what Christians 
think him, the Lord of all, he is also the key to all. 
And it can not be required of the Christian that 
he should try to make sense of his world without 
taking advantage c: what is, for him, its central 
Fact. 

Finally, it is suggested throughout the lectures 
that no problem of life is at present completely 
soluble on the level of thought alone. And this 
because life is actually incomplete and the world 
unfinished. ‘Therefore, for most of our problems, 
the full solutions remain yet to be worked out, and 
every question of theory brings us sooner or later 
face to face with a question of practice. In all 
reflection a point is always reached where, before 
further progress can be made, something must be 
done. Christianity is, indeed, neither a philosophy 
nor a life, but both, and both at the same time. 
At its center there stands not just a great idea, but 
a great Personality who embodies both thought 
and action—who is Way and Truth and Life. 


12 PREFACE 


That Personality seeks to breed in his followers, 
neither a system of thought alone nor yet just a 
program of action, but a spirit of enterprise in 
which thought and action shall co-operate in the 
task of making the Kingdom of God. And the 
line of advance towards a better religious under- 
standing of the world lies along the line of fuller 
exploration of the possibilities of discipleship to 
Jesus. 

The thanks of the writer are rendered to the 
Trustees of The John Bohlen Lectureship whose 
action made the delivery of these lectures possible. 
They are printed as, with some necessary contrac- 
tions, they were delivered. Grateful acknowledg- 
ment is also made to the Rt. Rev. H. St. George 
Tucker for a careful reading of the entire manuscript 
and for various criticisms and suggestions made by 
him. Portions of it have also been kindly read by 
Dean Berryman Green and Prof. W. E. Rollins. 
My wife, Anne Lee Bell, in the course of criticizing, 
appreciating, typing and revising the lectures has 
acquired a familiarity with them not likely to be 
duplicated. 

W. COSBY BELL. 


Virginia Theological Seminary, © 
March, 1925. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER I 


THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 


Introduction: (1) Increased knowledge of details adds to the 
difficulty of a study of the idea of creation; (2) but such an 
inquiry can not be shirked, for fundamental questions are the 
important ones. Moreover (3) it is our,own world that we 
have to understand and (4) real, if incomplete, knowledge of 
it is possible. 


I. Tue Inka or CREATION AS A RELIGIOUS TRADITION 
ih 


2. 


Il. Toe REASONABLENESS OF F'arTH IN Gop AS CREATOR..... 
1 


In non-Christian religions—Dualism of early 
thought. 

In the religion of Israel and in Christianity: (a) 
References. (b) Problems raised by evolution. 
(c) The interpretation of Genesis chh. i-iil. , 


Faith in God (a) grows up out of the many-sided 
life-process; (b) in its Christian form, is the gift 
of Jesus; and (c) depends for its continuance upon 
the continuing experience of life with God. (d) 
That it should become reflective means attempts 
at a philosophy of faith. 


. Beliefs and their verification. (a) Our knowledge 


real but incomplete. (b) Hence initial beliefs 
take the form of postulates. (c) The nature of the 
postulation process. (d) Postulates may be in- 
creasingly verified as they are found (1) to 
interpret experience and (2) to meet the needs of 
life. (e) Such a process of successful verification 
issues in rational knowledge. 


13 


PAGE 
21 


14 CONTENTS 


3. Faith in God is found rational in proportion as 
the idea of God approves itself a principle of 
Light and of Life. 


4, The uses and limitations of philosophy. 


Ill. A JUSTIFICATION OF THE INITIAL VENTURE........... 


1. A fully reasoned faith in God has to be won. 


2. The initial venture, in the case of the young, 
commonly made on the basis of authority. 


3. The study of the history of religion reveals a 
wider authority—the authority of Man. 


CHAPTER II 
THE METHOD OF CREATION 


Evolution means more exact knowledge of creation.......+..06. 
I. CHrisTIAN THEISM AND EXVOLUTION..........2++-+00. 


Three main causes of difficulty: 
1. Failure to distinguish between the form and the 
substance of belief. But Christian faith is faith 
in God, not in any particular kind of process. 


2. A deistic view of God’s relation with the world. 
But God as Holy Spirit is immanent in the natural 
process. 


3. Confusion of the scientific theory of evolution 
with interpretations of it made by Naturalistic 
philosophy. But other—and better—interpreta- 
tions are possible. Evolution may be understood 
as the creative method of God. 


Il. Man’s. PLACE. Ins NATURD S $s Se a ee eee 


1. The Christian view of man’s value reflected in 
the older science. 

2. But called in question by modern astronomy and 
the theory of evolution. 

3. Man and astronomy. (a) Twoscalesof measure- 
ment—quantitative and qualitative. (b) The 
spiritual valuation of man, (c) in a spiritual 
universe. 

4, Man and evolution. (a) Two features of the 
evolutionary process—continuity and difference. 


PAGE 


CONTENTS 


(b) Man’s continuity with all below him. (ce) And 
difference. (1) Evolution is the working out of 
the specific possibilities of life, (2) and man is the 
climax of earthly evolution, physically and spir- 
itually. (c) Hence man fulfills the past history of 
the earth and seems to hold the keys of the future. 


5. The evolutionary process read (a) backward and 


(b) forward. Man interprets Nature. 
6. Man dignified by his history. 
7. The moral meaning of his supremacy. 


TL LDBA' OF CRBATIONS es ee en Ua Pe 


1. Creation a continuous process. 


2. Two types of representation, (a) Emanation, (b) 


Creation. 
3. A possible synthesis. 


IV. CrEeaATIon A Co-OPERATIVE ENTERPRISD......... 
1. Relative independence and power of initiative in 


(a) Animals and (b) Man. 


2. Man’s relation with God that of dependent- 


independence. 


3. In man, life becomes raw material for art. 
4, And God works increasingly with spiritual tools. 
5. Creation becomes a task shared by God with 


man, 


6. The question whether this constitutes a limitation 


of God. 
CHAPTER III 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 


The question raised whether the world has a central Purpose 
Berar PURPOSEFUL WORLD el yee oe bed aants 


1. A purposeful system defined. 
2. Picturization of the world-process. 


3. Two features of the process: (a) progress, (b) 


correlated progress. 
4, The process seems to be purposeful. 


15 


PAGE 


16 


Cn 


Il. Tue 
1. 


2. 
3. 


IV. MAN AND NaTuRE 


1. 


CONTENTS 


. But purpose is to be discovered as a spiritual 


quality of the whole, not as one physical factor 
among others. 


PURPOSH OF THE WORLD. i...2.<s0+ sees ae 


The question becomes, What is the purpose of the 
world? 

“Happiness” is not an adequate answer. 

The answer suggested by the world itself is “Life.” 


. Life can fulfill itself only through harmonious 


effort directed towards the highest ends. 


. This is the idea of the Kingdom of God, which is, 


therefore, the chief end of the world. 


WoORLD-PURPOSE AS REVEALED IN JESUS......... 
. Jesus relates himself to the world-purpose and 


brings it into focus for us. 


. This the essential meaning of the New Testament 


conception of him as the Logos or Word of God. 


. The discovery of the purpose of the world focussed 


in Jesus gives to life (a) the sense of direction and 
(b) an adequate object for service. 


The official Christian view as expressed (a) in the 
ancient creeds, (b) in the Old Testament, (c) in 
the teaching of Jesus. 


. This view not always maintained in historic 


Christianity. 


. Resulting alienation from the world—not always 


unjustified. 


. Any Christian reconciliation of spiritual and 


natural must conserve the primacy of the spir- 
itual. Such reconciliation is to be found: (a) in 
the recognition of Nature’s kinship with us; (b) 
in the increasing use of the natural as the instru- 
ment of the spiritual. 


- But such a transformation of the material is not 


inevitable; there are always two ways. 


. The problem to be solved finally not by ascetic 


flight but through creative action. 


. Summary. 


eoceeoereeee ese ee eevee eevee ee ee ee eevee 


PAGE 


CONTENTS 17 
CHAPTER IV 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 
PAGE 
The question of Providence raised in relation with the purpose 
IEREOOTIO DMI y ea hi tt UMC IGEN TE GoM dine SMS Lae RRC aN AS yay 136 
Ae LOE IDWA OF PP HOVIDENCE 0.5 Sols do ldaiaiivsie ce ve deldlelaun 136 


1, Three presuppositions of providence. 

2. Immanence and transcendence defined. 

3. Attempted discriminations: general and special 
providence; nature and grace. Providence defined. 

4. It is only a fragment of a whole that we have 
before us—yet the fragment should give us real 
knowledge. 

5. Real knowledge must be based on actual experi- 
ence. 

6. Two unsatisfactory views: (a) that every event 
necessarily embodies a purpose of God; (b) that 
providence consists exclusively in meeting indi- 
vidual emergencies. 

7. Our view of providence depends upon our view 
of life. 

8. The normal process of the world is providential. 
It has three main features. 

9. These features must be kept in mind in any dis- 
cussion of providence that is relevant to our 
actual world. 

II. Some Princreues OF PROVIDENCE......... 00sec eeeeess 151 

1. The principle of Growth. 

2. The principle of Law. 

3. The principle of Freedom (a) in Man, (b) in God. 

4. The principle of Religion—Prayer. 

5. The principle of Care for Individuals. 

III. Jesus Curist AS PROVIDENCE IN ACTION.........0+006. 169 

1. Specially significant periods in history. 

2. Jesus Christ is Providence incarnate. 

3. Two far-reaching provisions of God revealed in 
him. (a) The duty of Joy. (b) The duty of 
Service. 


18 CONTENTS 


PAGE 


4, On the religious level the speculative euestions of 
providence change into practical préb:vms. 
5. Final definition of providence. 


6. Actual life is the outcome of human initiative and 
divine providence. 


CHAPTER V 
THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 


Thé- problemi stated. OS. eis eden eae & lk ee eee fea Ota 


1: Tam PROBLEM: DEFINDD, sss 0sis cs tiie Fa ea 
1. Not all suffering is the result of sin. 
2. Mill’s indictment of Nature. 
3. Huxley’s suggestion that ethical life must take 
the form of a struggle against Nature. 
4. The problem is fully felt only on a religious view 
of the world. 
5. The problem re-stated from this standpoint. 
6. It is not a problem of reconciling ‘‘suffering” with 
“omnipotence.” 
II. Toe DIMENSIONS OF THE PROBLEM.........-.-2+ece00- 
1. Sentimental optimism and pessimism. 
2. The main rhythm of life is optimistic. 


Til!) Some. Vital Vaburs or Pamc..5).oeaeuia se pee ee 
1. Pain is experimentally found to perform certain 
functions and is correlated with the production of 
certain values: (a) In the animal world, (b) in the 
human world. (c) Correlation with spiritual 
values. 
2. This suggests that the element of suffering in life 
is purposeful. 
3. We can begin to understand the world only in the 
light of its own end, the increase of life. 
. The romance of life. 
5. This view of the world results in optimistic 
realism. 


nes 


IV. SurrerRING AND THE PURPOSE OF THE WORLD 


1. The world not only a place of training but also 
a field of service. 

2. We may come to feel that the end is worth the 
cost. 

3. There is healing power in fellowship among the 
servants of the Purpose. 

4, And in the fellowship of God. 

V. Tue TRANSMUTATION OF SUFFERING...........00000: 

1. Such a view does not enable us to interpret every 
event. 

2. Nor is every event necessarily the result of a 
particular purpose of God. 

3. Events may occur that are accidents for God as 
well as for man. 

4. And yet they may be creatively dealt with by 
God and man and so transmuted into good. 

5. Future possibilities. 

6. Optimism and pessimism in St. Paul and Scho- 
penhauer. 

7. The solutions offered by Buddhism and by Chris- 


No 


CONTENTS 


tianity. 


CONCLUSION 


. The idea of religion as a means of escape from life. 
. The idea of religion as loyalty to God. 
. Jesus teaches us that religious loyalty finds its 


deepest expression in service of the purposes of 
God. 


. Religion, so understood and practiced, solves the 


problem of escape from the weaknesses of self- 
consideration. 


. And confers the gift of power. 
. The victories of religion are won by offering men 


tasks worth the gift of a life. 


218 


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tite 
es 


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A ae sy 


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SHARING IN CREATION 


CHAPTER I 
THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 


There is some reason for hesitation, nowadays, 
before attempting a study of the Christian idea of 
Creation. The business of making worlds, though it 
be only on paper, is not so easy as it once was. And 
the increased difficulty is due to increase of knowl- 
edge. It is the fact that we know more about the 
actual structure and working of our world that makes 
us less willing to embark upon hasty generaliza- 
tions. On the one hand an enlarged appreciation 
of the magnitude and complexity of the process 
which has conferred upon us the gift of our brief 
lives, has bred in us a deepened sense of its mystery. 
And on the other, the same appreciation tends to 
temper with caution our philosophic valor. There 
are appalling masses of brute fact which must be 
taken into consideration. The sciences—physics, 
chemistry, geology, biology, anthropology, psychol- 
ogy—have poured new riches into the common 
stock of knowledge; and with this fresh knowledge, 
theory must make terms. Our view of the world 
must reflect as completely as possible our knowl- 
edge of the world. And if, as may well be, our 

21 


22 SHARING IN CREATION 


familiar religious beliefs about it remain, unimpaired 
or even strengthened, yet they stand, often, in new 
settings and come to us with fresh emphases. 

The difficulty is increased by the fact that much 
of the new knowledge is of a sort that can be fully 
understood and handled only by specialists. And 
the non-specialist who undertakes the task of inter- 
pretation is exposed to all the perils of collision with 
facts which he knows incompletely or not at all. 
And yet there would seem to be need among our 
specialists of those who are prepared to take the risk 
of specializing in interpretation. For after all, the 
most important question we can ask is not just how 
much we know, but what is the meaning of our 
knowledge for life. Until we have asked that ques- 
tion and found some sort of answer to it, though 
knowledge may come, wisdom lingers. It is, indeed, 
significant that in each of the great races of man- 
kind, the earliest reflection upon the world takes the 
shape of a cosmogony, a doctrine of creation. Whence 
comes our world? What does life in it mean? 
Whither is it bound?—these are the first questions 
because they are the most important questions. 
Some answers to them must’ be found—or we must 
decide that no answers are possible—before we 
can get on intelligently with the business of living. 
The kind of system to which we belong determines, 
in the last resort, the kind of life that we ought to 
attempt. Here, as always, the most fundamental 
questions are the most practical ones. It is not 
presumption but necessity that leads children to 
ask the largest questions first: Who made the 
world? And why? And when? 


THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH = 23 


The importance of the task, then, is its justifi- 
cation. And something of unnecessary difficulty 
may be avoided by remembering that it is this world 
that we have first of all to understand. It is, as the 
philosophers say, our primary datum—the imme- 
diate thing given us as matter for reflection. No 
doubt the starry heavens that wakened Kant to 
wonder are, in a sense, part of our experience also, 
but we know comparatively little about them. 
What we do know, however, is enough to assure 
us that the entire universe in which we live is, in 
some sense, a single coherent system. And this 
means that knowledge of a part ought to give us some 
knowledge of the whole. To know truly something 
of this world is to know something of the wider 
system in which it is a member. To know God as 
He meets us and deals with us in this world of time 
and space, is to know God truly, however incom- 
pletely. To know man as he strives and struggles 
on this planet, is to know the beginnings of all that 
man may someday become. 

The agnostic suggestion that neither God, if 
there be a God, nor the world, nor man can be 
really known, we may put aside as philosophic neu- 
rasthenia. We were born, as a race, of our world, 
bone of its bone, flesh of its fleshe We have been 
living, as a race, in our world for many thousands 
of years. And we have been living in it with some 
success; we have made fairly effective liaison with 
its processes and are able increasingly to understand 
and control them. We have lived in it long enough, 
too, to have acquired a certain perspective. The 
course of its history begins to be long enough for us 


24. SHARING IN CREATION 


to pick out salient tendencies therein and frame a 
judgment from them upon whither it is moving. 
And each day and every hour of each day the world 
is the very texture of our life; it is calling to us with 
a thousand voices; it is offering us a thousand ex- 
periences; it is demanding of us a thousand responses. 
It is no remote and alien star, this world of ours, 
nor are we aliens in it, but rather its own children. 
It is the theatre of our existence, and, unless we are 
a race of congenital morons, we ought to know 
something substantial and serious about it. We 
have no excuse for not knowing; it is our business 
to know. And we have no right to dismiss even the 
largest questions with a non-possumus, until we 
have tried to answer them—no right to abandon 
the idea of God before searching for Him; nor to 
dismiss religion as moonshine without conducting 
any religious experiments. 


I 
THe Reiicious TRADITION 


Different answers have been and are still being 
given to the question as to the whence and whither 
of the world. It is from the dark to the dark, answers 
the agnostic. We can not tell whence we come or 
whither we are bound. It is from dust to dust, 
answers the materialist. All the order and organi- 
zation and life that constitute our world were born 
of matter in motion; into matter in motion they 
subside at the last. The Christian answer is an 
answer of hopeful knowledge: Itis from God to God. 


THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 25 


That answer comes to us first in the form of a 
religious belief, an element in the normal religious 
life. And the belief is not confined to any one 
religion nor to any one section of mankind. The 
conviction that our world is somehow the expression 
of intelligent, purposeful Power of the sort we name 
Divine is a world-wide belief, a racial belief of 
man. We find it in its crudest form in the so-called 
“high gods of low races,’”’ of whom Andrew Lang 
makes, perhaps, too much in his Making of Religion. 
Thus the Baganda, a central African tribe, worship 
Katonda, ‘‘The Father of the gods,” “the Creator, 
who is said to have made all things.’ Traces of 
such higher creative Powers are to be found in many 
savage religions. It is true that recognition of 
them co-exists with belief in many lesser gods and 
that the larger part of the tribal worship is directed 
towards these more accessible beings. But the 
belief in supreme creative Power is there also, and 
it is a germ out of which clearer ideas may develop. 


On higher levels of civilization the belief that 
our world is the outcome of creative intelligence 
takes on more definite forms. We find it in Egypt 
as early as 2000 B.c. “Hail to Thee, Amon-Ra,”’ 
runs an ancient hymn, “maker of all things, lord 
of law, father of the gods, maker of men, creator of 
beasts, the One without a second.’” We find it in 
India, in the hymns of the Rig-Veda that center on 
Varuna: “This Lord, who knows all things, has 
propped up these heavens; he has fixed the boun- 
daries of the earth. . . . All things, O Varuna, 


1 Roscoe, The Baganda, p. 290. 
2 Renouf, Origin and Growth of Relig. in Anc. Egypt, p. 220. 


26 SHARING IN CREATION 


are of thy creation.””’ The Zend-Avesta, the sacred 
book of Persia, begins with these words: ‘‘I pro- 
claim and worship Ahura-Mazda, the Creator.” 
In the ancient religion of China, Tien or Heaven, 
the Supreme Spirit, is regarded as creator of man- 
kind, sometimes alone, sometimes in partnership with 
earth. 
Heaven in giving birth to the multitudes 
of the people, 
To every faculty and relationship annexed 
its law.? 


So, all round the world, we discover the reli- 
gious mind of man struggling to lift itself out of 
the murk of irrational polytheism into clearer air. 
It is an attempt, it is true, not so far completely 
successful. ‘These quotations represent high water 
marks of the ancient religious spirit. And these 
insights do not, in any of the cases referred to, 
succeed in organizing themselves into a clear-cut 
monotheistic religion. They record an effort and 
a tendency rather than a completed achievement. 

A comparison of various early cosmogonies 
reveals, indeed, as a fairly constant feature a sort 
of naive dualism. The divine creative agency is 
usually pictured as impressing form and order upon 
an already existing chaotic material. On early levels 
this would seem to be nothing more than an in- 
evitable limitation of that picture-thinking which 
is the form of all early reflection. One can visualize 
creative activity only in relation with some sort 
of raw material given it to work upon. That is the 
form of our own creative enterprises, and to our 

3 Sht King, ITLiii.2 


THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 27 


own experience we are tied so far as our power of 
imaging is concerned. It is more important that 
such childlike, unrefiective dualism often serves as 
the basis of a later philosophy which casts it into 
reasoned form and makes it explicit. For, indeed, 
every early philosophy has its roots in a complex 
of still earlier unrefiective religious beliefs and takes 
its color from them more than is generally supposed. 
“The idea of a primordial chaos, which was a 
staple element in myth, passes over in another 
form, into the philosophical construction of the 
great thinkers of antiquity.’’* It is so in Greece, 
where the Greek notion of hulé, or unformed raw 
material, which is only partly malleable by Mind, 
generates the dualism that dogs all later Greek 
philosophy. Something of that ancient dualism 
passed into Christian theology in later centuries. 
And if Christians have sometimes been trained to 
think of the world of nature as the enemy of God, 
it is partly through contact with strains of thought 
that came from Athens rather than from Israel. 
The Christian sacred literature begins with the 
explicit assertion that our world owes its origin to 
the creative action of one personal God. ‘‘In the 
beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” 
Even if, as some scholars think, there are remini- 
scences of an earlier dualism present in the Genesis 
account, they never play any part in later Jewish 
thought and never achieve a reasoned form. The 
strict monotheism of the later Hebrews, together 
with their strong tendency to refer all events to 
the causal action of Jehovah, forbade the recogni- 
4 Matthews, Studies in Christian Philos., p. 195. 





28 SHARING IN CREATION 


tion of any original material existing along with 
Him but not derived from Him. 


Throughout the Bible it is the religious interest 
that controls the outlook and determines belief. 
And the biblical references to creation are in 
character religious rather than speculative or 
scientific. The statements made about it are 
couched in the everyday language of life rather than 
of the schools; they are picturesque rather than 
precise, suggestive rather than descriptive; informal 
and unphilosophized. But the Old and New 
Testaments unite in understanding the world of 
material things and of human life as the creation 
of God. So Isaiah writes: ‘Thus saith the Lord 
who created the heavens; He is God who formed 
the earth; He created it not a chaos; He formed 
it to be inhabited.”® The same assertion meets 
us in the opening verses of the Gospel of St. John: 
“In the beginning was the Word and the Word 
was with God and the Word was God. Through 
Him were all things made.” ‘By faith,’ writes 
the author of Hebrews, ‘we understand that the 
worlds have been framed by the word of God, so 
that what is seen hath not been made out of the 
things which appear.’’® 


So the Bible, in all its parts, builds behind 
human life the background of the creative purpose 
of God. And in all the Christian centuries that 
doctrine remains the basis of the Christian view 
of the world. But the advent of the scientific 

6 Is. xlv.18. 


* Heb. xi.l. See also Job xxxviii—xli; Proverbs viii; Matt.v.45-7; I Cor. 
vili.6, etc. 


THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH = 29 


theory of evolution in definite form, some sixty 
years ago gave rise, within and without the Church, 
to a series of discussions as to the particular fashion 
in which the creative process must be conceived. 
The questions thus raised were extensively discussed 
and the necessary readjustments were very generally 
made. Recent rumblings of debate suggest, how- 
ever, that it is still desirable to devote some attention 
to the questions involved. 

Two distinct problems seem to be created in 
the minds of men when they come into contact 
with the doctrine of evolution. One is a biblical 
problem; the other is a philosophical one. The 
first is: What is the relation between the evolu- 
tionary view of things and the teaching of the 
Bible, especially of the opening chapters of Genesis. 
The second is: What is the bearing of evolution 
on the religious conception of God as Creator. 
These two questions are very generally confused, 
but they are really quite different. We will takel 
the first question now and reserve the second for 
discussion in the next chapter. : 

Our immediate concern, then, is with the 
right interpretation of the creation narratives in 
Genesis, chapters i-ii. But before that can be 
properly undertaken, we need to ask a preliminary 
question as to the nature of the narratives. For 
the interpretation of any piece of literature depends 
upon its character. Of two works dealing with the 
ocean, if the first is—say—a technical treatise on 
Oceanography we interpret it one way; if the second 
is a sea poem of John Masefield’s we interpret it 
another way. And if we handle the poem as if it 


30 SHARING IN CREATION 


were a treatise and the treatise as if it were a sea- 
song, we shall end by completely misunderstanding 
both of them. 

Neglecting the purely critical problem of the 
several documents and their literary history, the 
origin of the creation narrative in Genesis is as 
follows. Each great section of mankind, when it 
reaches a certain level of development, comes face 
to face with the question of the origin and meaning 
of the world. The awakening religious and philo- 
sophical interests demand some answer to the riddle 
of the earth. That demand gives rise to the various 
cosmogonies of ancient times, each constructed on 
the basis of the religious and cultural knowledge 
attained by that particular people. So far as literary 
form is concerned, the account in Genesis stands in 
analogy with these accounts. It occupies a much 
higher level than any of them with which I am 
familiar, but it springs out of the same interests 
and is the same kind of thing. Behind it, though 
rather remotely, lie still older accounts in Baby- 
lonian and other Semitic literature. ‘We have, 
then, in the first chapters of Genesis, the Hebrew 
version of a great Semitic epic dealing with the 
beginning of all things. . . . . It has come down 
to us in the form which it has received from the 
minds of devout Israelites, moved by the spirit of 
God and penetrated with the pure belief in the 
spiritual Jehovah.’’ ‘‘What happened in the case 
of the biblical cosmogony is this: that during a 
long development within the sphere of Hebrew 
religion, it was gradually stripped of its cruder 
" TBishop Ryle, Early Narratives of Gen. p. 12. 


THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 31 


mythological elements, and transformed into a 
vehicle for the spiritual ideas which were the peculiar 
heritage of Israel.’’8 

Now such early religious and philosephical 
writing represents an effort to give expression to 
certain beliefs. And the attempt to express them 
takes natural form in what may be called picture 
thinking or picture writing. We may, and still 
do, give form to our ideas in either one of two 
ways. We may make a plain, colorless statement, 
or we may make the idea into a picture. We may 
say, ‘““The sun is setting;” or we may say, 


The sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out; | 
__At one stride comes the dark—— 


and most people know what we mean, in the second 
instance, though, in point of fact, the stars do 
not “rush” anywhere and the dark does not really 
“stride” at all. Now early cosmogonies are like 
this—with a difference. The difference is that 
while with us such picture-writing is more or less 
deliberate, it is in earlier times quite unconscious 
and natural. To express a belief or to give form 
to a truth men quite naturally and inevitably vis- 
ualized it in the form of a picture or told themselves 
a story which dramatized it. Instead of just saying 
that God did so and so, one made for oneself a sort 
of mental moving picture of Him doing it. To 
do this is not to make an allegory, for an allegory 
is a deliberate literary construction with a double 
meaning. And the Genesis narrative is not alle- 
gorical. It is rather the result of a native and 


8 Skinner, I. C. C., Genesis. 


32 SHARING IN CREATION 


natural movement of the mind giving picturesque 
expression to its beliefs. We really have in the 
Genesis story examples of both types of statement, 
the direct and the pictorial. ‘“‘In the beginning 
God created the heavens and the earth’’—that is 
the colorless form. And all the rest of Chapter i 
just dramatizes the truth expressed in the first 
verse. : 

The Genesis narrative is, then, a philosophy of 
creation and of human life cast in pictorial form. 
And this means that it aims to give, not a matter 
of fact account of the origin of the world, describing 
with scientific precision the processes by which it 
came to be, but rather an impressive account from 
the standpoint of men’s religious and philosophical 
interests. It is concerned with ultimate rather 
than with secondary questions; with the “Why?” 
rather than with the “‘How?” of things. The 
descriptions of process are merely incidental parts 
of the picture. And to attempt to extract from 
them exact science or, indeed, any science at all, 
is grievously to mishandle them. All attempts 
to “reconcile”? Genesis and science—and there have 
been many of them—are wrong in principle. It is 
as if one looked into a geography for the far country 
into which the Prodigal Son went. It is as if one 
painfully searched natural history books for the 
queer beasts of the Book of Revelation. ‘No 
attempt at reconciling Gen. i with the details of 
modern science has ever been known to succeed 
without entailing a degree of special pleading and 
forced interpretation to which, in such a case, we 


THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH — 33 


should be wise to have no recourse.”’? The outcome 
of such an attempt is, indeed, only an artificial 
emulsion of ancient religious philosophy and modern 
science. It is like a mixture of oil and water that 
will stay together only so long as you keep shaking 
it. And this not because either Genesis or science 
is untrue, but because they record different kinds 
of truth reached along different lines of inquiry. 
One should no more go to the Bible for one’s geology 
than one goes to geology for a philosophy of the 
world. 

It would seem, then, that these chapters can 
be interpreted rightly only when, refusing either 
to mechanize them or to allegorize them, we dis- 
entangle from the incidental form the essential 
truths and insights which they record. ‘Taken so 
and read naturally in the key in which they were 
written, they are found to contain the outlines of a 
very noble cosmology and a very lofty theology. 
In place of the almost universal polytheism found 
in ancient religious literature, one great Figure 
moves through these pages—the One Supreme God, 
who is the cause and ground of all existence. High 
above the world He is, its Maker and Lord, and yet 
in close touch with it; it is one of His homes?and 
He walks in its garden in the cool of the evening. 
A righteous God He is, too, for the only thing He 
hates in the world is sin. No room is left for dualistic 
ideas of matter as being somehow inherently evil; 
they are ruled out by the statement that God 
looked upon the world and saw that it was good. 
The goal of creation is spiritual, for man, the end 


® Bp. Ryle, op. cit., p.7. 


34 SHARING IN CREATION 


that crowns the work, is the kinsman of God, made 
in His image. He is, indeed, at once the child of 
the earth, made of its dust, and the child of God, 
gifted with intelligence, conscience and freedom. 
But these very gifts involve dangers. He has 
power conferred upon him to obey or to disobey 
the law of God. In part he obeys and in part he 
disobeys; the gates of the garden of untried inno- 
cence swing shut behind him; and he enters upon 
a life of effort and struggle in which he must “win 
his obedience by the things that he suffers.”” And 
of that struggle the ideal outcome is victory, a 
victory in which childlike innocence is replaced 
by matured character, that has won the power 
steadily to do the right and avoid the wrong. The 
seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head, 
though its fangs shall bruise his heel. 

This is the view of the world which stands 
written in the large simplicities of the Book of 
Beginnings. ‘To miss these meanings is to miss 
the meaning of the narrative; it is to have one’s 
attention so held by the form that the substance 
escapes. And this view is one in essentials with 
the Christian view. When we say the Christian 
Creed: ‘I believe in God, the Father, Almighty, 
Maker of heaven and é¢arth,”’ we link hands across 
ages with those earlier thinkers of our religious 
tradition. - And it is something—it is much— 
that when we turn to the first pages of our religious 
literature, we find that they need neither to be 
dismissed as discredited nor apologized for as 
childish, but only require to be sympathetically 
understood. Childlike they are, indeed, but not 


THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 35 


childish, nor is there in them anything trivial or 
gross. They move upon the level of a majestic 
simplicity, in keeping with their great theme; they 
have an orchestral quality; they render great music 
greatly. In the sense in which they aim at truth, 
they are true with a completeness and permanence 
of veracity not easily attainable in any age. In- 
spired we must call them, too, if we think that 
God co-operates in every great work of man, and 
that noble expression of religious truth is a sign of 
His presence. Perhaps, no piece of religious liter- 
ature has been so generally maltreated, alike by 
its enemies and its friends. But to read it afresh 
upon its own terms, is to discover that we have 
in it ‘a body of religious truth which distinguishes 
the cosmogony of Genesis from all similar com- 
positions, and entitles it to rank among the most 
important documents of revealed religion.’’!° 


II 


Tue REASONABLENESS OF FAITH IN GOD AS 
CREATOR 


The idea of God as Creator takes in history 
primarily the form of a religious faith. Into it,_ 
intellectual elements have, of course, always entered, 
for every religious belief involves some sort of 
philosophy, whether the philosophy be clearly 
worked out or no. But the belief as it is inherited 
by us today is not just the result of an intellectual 
process; faith in God is not, historically, just the 
Q.E.D. at the end of a demonstration. It has been 


#0 (Skinner, I. C. C., Genests, p. 7). 
x 


36 SHARING IN CREATION 


developed in the much more complex and many- 
sided processes of human life, which include elements 
that are emotional, experimental, and volitional 
as well as those that are purely “logical.’”’ Men 
have often—perhaps usually—found faith in God 
to be a practicable and necessary element in their 
lives, without feeling compelled to reflect overmuch 
either upon the motives of their faith or the reasons 
for it. 

In particular, the belief in its Christian form 
reaches us primarily as the result, not of a philo- 
sophic, but of a religious movement. The Christian 
idea of God took shape in the minds of men through 
the experience of living under the influence of 
Jesus Christ. And on his lips and in his teaching 
“God” is a formula for life, not for debate. His 
teaching embodies not an argument but a revela- 
tion; his aim is not to show the consistency of 
faith in God with reason, but to bring men to see 
the God whom he sees, and to know the companion- 
ship with God that he knows, and to live in the 
service of God as he does. “One is your Father, 
even God, and all ye are brethren.” ‘He maketh 
His sun to rise on the evil and on the good.” 
‘““‘Wherefore if God so clothe the grass of the field.” 
‘‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
God.” Here is no massive induction addressed to 
the mind alone, but an insight and a revelation, 
demanding the response of life. Jesus throws out 
his teaching with a sort of divine carelessness as 
to its speculative justification. He offers it as 
bread of life, certain that hungry men will recognize 
food when they see it, apart from any theory of 


THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH = 37 


nutrition. He sows it with a free hand, certain 
that living seed in good soil will grow, irrespective 
of any philosophy of growth. 

So the Christian idea of God originates not in 
the schools of logic but in the school of the prophets, 
in whose spiritual lineage Jesus stands. And 
Christian faith in God lives from age to age by 
virtue of the renewal of those same insights and 
the re-discovery of those same revelations. In the 
last resort the reason men believe in God is that 
they suppose themselves to have discovered God. 
They have discovered God as “the dependable 
object of religious experience’’; they have seen Him 
as @ spiritual energy at work in the world of Nature; 
they are aware of a comradeship with Him in 
the daily business of living. And in default of 
such personal discovery of God, argument is of 
little use. As well might one vainly seek by descrip- 
tion to introduce a deaf man to music; what he 
needs is not to be told about music but to hear it; 
only thereafter will description begin to have 
meaning. Discussion, indeed, can do only two 
things. It can help to remove difficulties that 
inhibit the discovery of God, and it can point out 
the lines along which the discovery may be made. 
More than this it can not do. And the true ob- 
jective of every religious discussion is not to produce 
a satisfactory verbal demonstration of God but to 
lead to the recognition of God; not to bring a man 
to accept a conclusion but to start a man saying 
his prayers. 

But such an experimental religious faith in 
God may later on become, and, at a certain level, 


38 SHARING IN CREATION 


usually does become reflective and self-critical. It 
begins to ask how the discovery of God is made and 
what are the reasons that render it valid. And the 
effort to answer these questions marks the beginning 
of a philosophy of faith. Such a philosophy has a 
double use. It may serve to undergird, clarify, and 
purify faith, and so increase its vitality. And it 
may serve as a help-and guide to those who wish to 
make an initial or a fuller discovery of God for them- 
selves. It does not lie, however, within the scope 
of our present purpose to attempt such a philosophy. 
To do so, even in outline, would carry us far beyond 
the limits assigned to our subject, which is not the 
reasonableness of faith in God, but the meaning of 
creation. Nevertheless, it may be useful to offer 
some suggestions as to the form which such a rational 
justification of faith might take. 

First of all, we need to understand our human 
situation in relation with the effort to construct a 
general philosophy of the world. It is stated with 
precision by St. Paul. “I know,” he says, “in part.’’!! 
We are beings with knowledge real but incomplete. 

Both sides of the statement are true. We are 
living in the world and dealing with it every day, 
and we have accumulated large stores of knowledge 
about it; enough, we may believe, to justify efforts 
at interpretation. But if it is the error of agnosticism 
that it discredits this real knowledge, it is the error of 
rigid intellectual dogmatism that it overlooks the par- 
tialness of our knowledge. We live indeed, as growing 
intelligences, gathering knowledge in a growing 
world. Our own mental powers are strictly limited 
and we are easily wearied by the difficult task of 


uJ Cor. xiii.12. 


THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH = 39 


. thinking. If it is obviously absurd to ask a com- 
plete philosophy from a ten-year old boy, it is only 
a little less absurd to ask it from Plato or Hegel. 
The total facts relevant to our world are only partly 
in our possession; unnumbered generations sickened 
and died without knowing that disease is caused by 
germs; it was only the other day that we learned 
something of the ionic structure of matter. 

And, finally, the world, which is the subject- 
matter of philosophy, is changing around us even 
as we reflect upon it. ‘‘The world, as we know it, 
is not a complete system, and since all reality is 
interdependent, no object within it 1s completely 
known.’’!2 Sufficiently developed it may be to 
furnish us with certain fixed facts and principles al- 
ready clearly disclosed. But for a perfectly com- 
plete, thorough-going, self-demonstrating system 
of philosophy with no loose ends and no unsolved 
problems we should need to know all the facts, 
actual and possible, in relation with each other, and 
be able to read off their full meaning. Such a phi- 
losophy may be possible to omniscience; it is cer- 
tainly not possible to us. Therefore said Lord 
Bacon, “perfection and completeness in divinity is 

- not to be sought.’”’ ‘“‘Necessary” systems of phi- 
losophy are, as a rule, singularly unconvincing except 
to those who have constructed them. 

From this situation it follows that our larger 
beliefs and interpretations—our beliefs about the 
world as a whole—necessarily take the form of postu- 
lates; that is, of assumptions for which the evidence, 
however large, is not such as to compel belief. A 


12 Inge, Fatth and tts Psychology, p. 193. 





40 SHARING IN CREATION 


“necessary” truth is, I suppose, a truth that can be 
so demonstrated that it is not susceptible of doubt 
by any rational mind. The question whether there 
are any such truths can be left to one side; certainly 
our major beliefs about the world are not among 
them. That we live in a world of persons, that 
there is a material world outside us, that liberty 
among men and nations is a good thing—these are 
all propositions for which the evidence is not strictly 
compulsory. They have all been doubted on a large 
scale in the course of human history. They are 
indeed postulates, assumptions, which we make, 
paradoxically enough, for reasons that are not ex- 
clusively rational. ‘‘Postulation is the expression 
of the motive-forces that impel us towards a certain 
assumption, the outcome of every organism’s 
unceasing struggle to transmute its experience into 
harmonious and acceptable forms ..... The 
organism can not help postulating because it can 
not help trying, because it must act or die. It 
therefore needs assumptions which it can act on and 
liveby. .. . These assumptions it obtains by postu- 
lating them in the hope that they may prove tenable 
[italics added] and the axioms are thus the outcome 
of a Will-to-believe which has had its way, which 
has dared to postulate, and, as William James has so 
superbly shown, been rewarded for its audacity by 
finding that the world granted what was de- 
manded.’’!8 

The above quotation suggests certain other 
features of the postulation-process. That postula- 
tion is legitimate—and, indeed, inevitable—does 

13 F,C,8. Schiller, in Personal Idealism, ed. by Henry Sturt, 91. 





THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 41 


not mean that one has a right to believe anything 
one chooses, that one may reasonably grasp at 
any fancy that floats through the mind and erect it 
into an article of faith merely because it “works” 
in the sense of satisfying the need that gave it birth. 
Its ‘‘working’’ may on occasion be only the working 
of an anaesthetic which puts the mind to sleep. 
Rational postulation means choosing, for good 
reasons, beliefs that one needs for life and going to 
work to find out how far and in what ways they are 
true. The belief, that is to say, should be suggested 
by experience, it should have behind it such evidence 
as our knowledge and experience permit, and, in 
order that it should continue to be reasonably held, 
it should lend itself to increasing verification as our 
knowledge and experience grow. Obviously in such 
a process there is always an element of venture. 
There is always the risk of error. But here, as every- 
where else, it is emphatically a case of nothing ven- 
ture, nothing win. In such a world as ours, the risk 
of error is inseparable from the discovery of truth. 
Undue nervousness over the danger of error might 
mean that one had successfully avoided all lesser 
mistakes in life—and made the one big mistake of 
never living at all. Under such a regime not only 
would the church bells, calling to prayer, cease to 
ring, but the wedding bells also, and the experiment 
of life on this planet would come to a quick end. 
‘“‘For our sins and our follies,”’ said Stevenson, ‘‘there 
is plenteous redemption; but not even God himself 
can forgive the hanger-back.”’ 

Carlyle wrote in a letter to a friend: ‘‘Belief, 
said one the other night, has done immense evil; 


42 SHARING IN CREATION 


witness the Anabaptists. True, I rejoined with 
vehemence, almost with fury, true, belief has done 
some evil in the world. But it has done all the 
good that was ever done in it, from the time that 
Moses saw the burning bush and believed it to be 
God appointing him deliverer of his people, down 
to the last act of belief that you and I executed. 
Good never came from aught else.’’!4 

The element of venture in postulation is a part 
of what theologians mean by faith. And the saying 
of St. Paul, ‘‘The just shall live by faith” is true 
in every field of experience. In no other way, 
indeed, can men live. 

But we have seen that such a venture to be 
reasonable ought to have some evidence behind 
it and that, to remain reasonable, it ought in- 
creasingly to verify itself in experience. And the 
question now becomes, how may such verification 
be accomplished? The answer is twofold. First, 
we may find that the belief in question is able over 
and over again to interpret and make sense of our 
growing knowledge and experience. Thus the law 
of gravitation first framed by Newton as a good 
guess continues to claim our belief because it con- 
tinues to explain and co-ordinate a large number of 
facts. The theory of evolution has the same broad 
basis of justification; it makes sense of a large 
number of facts otherwise chaotic and meaningless. 
Further, the rational strength of a postulate grows 
with the magnitude and number and importance 
of the facts which it interprets. And all this applies 
to the largest ideas that we can frame, the most 


14Froude’s Carlyle, vol. ii, p. 193. 





THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 43 


serious mental venture that we can make. “The 
only test of a theory of the Universe,” says W. H. 
Moberly, “is that it should make the facts of the 
world intelligible, and that philosophy is the truest 
which makes the most sense. The question is always: 
It professes to explain. Does it explain?’’! 

It will be observed that Dr. Moberly says that 
the only test of a theory is, whether or no it has, 
when put to the test, adequate power of explanation. 
And that is true, if it be remembered that life is to 
be included as one of the facts to be taken into 
account. We find ourselves with the gift of life 
in our hands, and, apparently, the system of which 
we are members means us to live as broadly and 
as deeply as we can contrive. Nature, indeed, as 
we shall see more fully in a later chapter, seems to 
be creatively working for the increase of life, physical, 
moral, mental. It is, in fact, the need of more life 
and fuller that sets us thinking, that is, so to say, 
the motivating power that puts the drive into all 
our intellectual explorations. And it is, I submit, 
most reasonable to hold that beliefs which make for 
the increase of life lie closest to the reality of our 
world. If life is to be a rational element in the world, 
then, other things being equal, beliefs that make 
for life, beliefs that brace us, physically, emotionally, 
morally, mentally, are most likely to be true.’ 
And conversely, beliefs that, taken seriously and 
acted upon, would cut the nerves of life, darken 
man’s intelligence or throw him into moral and 





is W. H. Moberly, in Foundations, ed. by Streeter, p. 437. 

16 Provided, of course, that they are found permanently to feed life and not 
merely to give it a fillip followed by a reaction—like an alcoholic drink. And every 
belief needs to be subjected to criticism as adequate as possible by the intelligence. 


44 SHARING IN CREATION 


intellectual confusion are likely to be out of touch 
with reality. If philosophy is not only logic but 
wisdom, then the wisest philosophy is likely to be 
that which breeds life. ‘Truth is the sort of reality 
which we reach by an inexorable demand of our 
nature. The principle on which we should work 
is that the final needs of our nature must have their 
justification.” 

In proportion as such processes of verification 
are successfully carried on, we may be said to reach 
knowledge, not, perhaps, in the sense of a perfectly 
luminous philosophy, but in the sense that the word 
must bear in our world—knowledge real, if in- 
complete; knowledge to which we may expect 
additions and corrections but which will not, we 
hope, be cancelled or proved to have been false. 
So rational faith may issue in sight, and of venture 
assurance may be born. ‘‘Postulation must be ad- 
mitted to be capable of leading to knowledge. .... 
and, indeed, the thought will readily occur, that it 
lies at the roots of knowledge.’ 

It is along these lines, then, that faith in a 
creative God may be found to be a rational attitude, 
that knowledge of God may be won. ‘The Christian 
position, though it is capable of indefinite expansion, 
may be stated very simply and briefly. First, 
it is by means of the idea of God, creative, that we 
can best make sense of the world. When we approach 
the world of Nature from the scientific angle, we 


17 Mark Baldwin, Fragments in Philosophy and Science, pp. 341-2. 
18 Schiller, Personal Idealism, p. 90. 


THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. 45 


find that it is a world in which order and system 
reign. And when we put questions to it as to the 
‘processes by which it works, it answers us not with 
gibberish but with good, honest, physical or chemi- 
cal or mathematical formulae. There seems to be 
thought in things, and thought is a function of Mind. 
Or when we trace out over great spaces of time the 
history of our world, it seems to us that through 
the ages one increasing Purpose runs, that the world 
is at one stage making itself ready for the beginning 
of life; that at another, life is moving on towards 
personal life. The forces of the world seem to be, 
in a phrase of Prof. J. Arthur Thomson, ‘confederate 
forces, moving towards an end; and purpose once 
discovered, sends us to look for its explanation in 
purposeful Mind. Or again, when we approach 
our world from the standpoint of aesthetics, we find 
it shot through with beauty, wild or quiet, stern or 
tender; and beauty cries aloud to be understood 
in the light of a Mind for whom beauty has value. 
Or again when man, the child of Nature, discovers 
himself a being aware of moral values, possessing a 
sense of right and wrong, bound over to the pursuit 
of ideals of the good and the true, the meaning 
would seem to be that not only man but the system 
which bred him is idealistic, and that in him an 
ethical quality of the system has begun to be re- 
vealed. Or yet again, when the religious life of man 
is discovered by the new science of the history of 
religion to be as normal to him and as inevitable as 
any other activity of his nature, that fact receives 
adequate explanation and meaning only through the 


46 SHARING IN CREATION 


idea of a real Object of religion, an Unseen Comrade 
who has walked with man all his days. So, we 
should urge, does the idea of God prove itself a 
principle of light, into whatever field we take it. 
It is through the idea of God that we can make 
sense and the best sense of our experience. When 
we look at our world through the field-glasses of 
reflective thought and turn the indicator to the 
word “God” the field of vision brightens; when 
we turn it off that point the field of vision darkens. 
The idea of God is a principle of Light. 

And, secondly, as the idea of God approves 
itself in experience a principle of Light, so faith in 
God approves itself a principle of Life. To live our 
lives with full joy and power we need to be confident 
that life had adequate meaning and purpose. We 
need to be assured that it is not “‘a tale told by an 
idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” And 
it is through the venture of faith in God, that this 
assurance is most directly and securely gained. To 
believe that our world has God behind it and 
within it is to find that it is a purposeful world, 
having a rational origin and moving towards 
rational ends. To think of our world as a derelict 
vessel adrift upon the deeps of space, is to know, if 
one reflects upon the situation, all the miasmas and 
inertias of the shipwrecked; to think of it as a vessel 
en voyage is to know the elation of the traveler. 
For it is a corollary of a purposeful system that 
its main elements are purposeful, and to identify 
this as God’s world is, by sure inference, to discover 
worthy ends and ideals for human life. Then, 


THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 47 


indeed, existence turns into a permanently hopeful, 
active, and interesting thing; and one wins an 
enthusiasm for living which lasts on when the first 
instinctive welcome that youth gives to life is past. 
And this is what St. John meant when he wrote: 
“This is eternal life, to know Thee, the only true 
God.” It is no literary accident that has united 
religion and life as inseparable ideas throughout 
the New Testament. For faith in God undergirds 
the daily business of living, and the correlation 
between religion and the full life seems to religious 
men an experimental fact. But this means, if it be 
true, that the same process which has produced man 
has made religion an indispensable element in 
effective living. And this, in turn, suggests that it 
is rational to believe that faith in God has its roots 
deep in reality. 

The above paragraphs suffer from weakness of 
extreme condensation. But they have also another 
weakness that is deeper and more fundamental. 
They are only—paragraphs. And even a series 
of lectures on the reasonableness of faith in God 
were only a series of lectures on the reasonableness 
of faith in God. They would prove that the writer 
had found faith in God a reasonable thing, and 
they might suggest to others the direction in which 
to seek a faith in God which might turn out to be 
reasonable. They might even convince a man here 
and there that faith in God—if one has it—is a 
rational thing. But that is all they could do; and 
that is not all that is wanted. ‘The intellect, by 
itself, moves nothing,” said Aristotle; and again, 


48 SHARING IN CREATION 


“the end is an action, not a quality’’—or, as we 
might put it, not a generalization but a deed. “The 
will and the feelings must be constantly exercised 
in the endeavor to realize facts and work out our 
convictions. The struggle for the higher life is so 
hard that we tend to leave ourselves behind, merely 
thinking and talking about the truth.’’! 

Herein lies the essential futility of ‘all philos- 
ophy that ends in philosophy and does not go on 
to become something more. It is of no use to anyone 
except the philosopher out of whose experience it 
was born, until someone else has gone to work to 
translate it into life, found that it is true, and so 
made it his philosophy. And so all useful reflection 
of this sort must end, not with a logical conclusion 
but with the demand for an experiment. And in 
the case before us it must be the experiment of an 
individual seriously going to work to find out whether 
or no God, the Creator, best interprets his total 
knowledge and experience; whether or no faith in 
God meets the needs of his life. Religion differs 
from other sides of human activity no whit in that 
it can be known only from the inside. One must 
work one’s way into a rational religious view of the 
world just as one must work one’s way into the 
scientific view. In each case only he that seeketh 
findeth. And in practice this means taking hold 
of such religious ideas and practices as lie nearest 
us, and trying to understand them and put them 
into action. To do that is to find, slowly it may be 
at first, but increasingly through the years, that 


19 Inge, Faith and its Psychology, p. 153 





THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 49 


God interprets my life, that God means life for me. 
Such a process may begin only with a prayer, born 
of tentative insights and experiments not yet com- 
plete, ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” 
But it may end in the knowledge: ‘I know him in 
whom I have believed and that He is become my 
salvation.” 

“Tt is a law of our nature that what we seek, 

that we shall, in some measure find. And so, like a 
rainbow, Life glitters in all the colours; like a rainbow 
also it adjusts itself to every beholder. To the 
dayflies of fashion life seems ephemeral; to the 
seeker after permanence, it strikes its roots into 
eternity. To the empty, it is a yawning chasm of 
inanity; to the full it is a source of boundless interest. 
To the indolent it is a call to despairing Sonat 
to the strenuous a call to dauntless energy. . . 
The cosmic order, which to one displays the un- 
swerving rigour iat a self-sufficient mechanism, 
grows explicable to another only by the direct 
guidance of the hand of God. To those of little 
faith the Heavens are dumb; to the faithful, they 
disclose the splendours of a beatific vision.””"": ” 


If 


A JUSTIFICATION OF THE INITIAL VENTURE 


The last word of a Theistic and Christian 
philosophy must be, then, the appeal, ‘‘Come 
taste and see how gracious the Lord is.”’ It must 
be admitted that such a venture, if it be made, 





»F,C.8. Schiller, Zumanism, p. 16. 


50 SHARING IN CREATION 


offers no absolute refuge in its initial stages from 
doubt nor any instant or easy solution of all possible 
problems. A complete religious philosophy of the 
world can not be handed a child along with his 
certificate of confirmation. Even the outlines of 
such a philosophy begin to appear only as, in life 
and thought, we work at our individual problems, 
try to understand and solve them in the light of 
God, and find, perhaps, that in this Light, solutions 
begin to appear. Nor is there any ground for 
supposing that the attainment of a fully reasoned 
faith in God is an easy task, any more than the 
attainment of an adequate scientific view is easy. 
When we reflect upon the reasonableness of faith 
in God, it is not, indeed, as if we were dealing 
with this or that separate element within the world; 
we are seeking to frame a judgment about the 
meaning of existence itself. And a long life is 
none too long to work out, even in a small way, 
the justifications and implications of such a judgment. 

In the normal religious life, the initial venture 
is usually made half-unconsciously in childhood or 
early youth. It is made naturally and reasonably, 
along with many other ventures, largely upon the 
authority of parents and kinsmen and the wider 
authority of the religious society into which we are 
born. Authority of this kind is, however, not 
mechanical or legal but personal and vital; it is the 
unescapable authority of past experience, and it 
inevitably plays a large part in the beginnings of 
religious faith. And its importance as an element 
in the religious life is progressively lessened in 


THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 51 


proportion as the traditional belief thus imparted 
is verified in our own experience of life in the world. 
But there are always those who have reached some 
degree of maturity without having made any vital 
contact with religion, men who have made their 
way hardly at all into the religious view of the 
world. Is there, for these, no rational substitute 
for the element of authority in youthful religion— 
no legitimate ‘‘jumping-off place’ for the man of 
maturer years? 

I think there is; and it is to be found in the 
recognition of a wider and a more august authority 
than that which surrounds the life of the child. 
It is an authority the full weight of which only 
recently begins to be appreciated. It has always 
been understood that religion was a universal 
human fact, the common possession of all the 
races and ages of mankind. But the natural con- 
clusion from this was in some measure inhibited 
by the general view of non-Christian religion as 
merely false religion, from which no inference could 
be drawn except that man is incredibly foolish and 
perverse. Now, a wider and more sympathetic 
study of the history of religion has taught us to 
appreciate the fact that along with the follies and 
perversities there runs everywhere, in all places and 
in all times, the golden thread of living religion. 
It is no dogma of the theologians but an assured 
result of the modern and impartial science of the 
history of religion, that religious growth is one of 
the major phases of the life of man on this planet, 
that religious experience is a central, not a peripheral, 
element in the total experience of the race. There 


52 SHARING IN CREATION 


may also be ample reason for believing that there 
has been true growth, movement towards a goal, 
and that this growth reaches a real fulfillment in 
One who has been called “The Desire of all nations.” 
But leaving this question to one side, as not relevant 
to our purpose, it has been made abundantly clear 
that man is by nature a religious being. Lazily 
religious he very often is, content with low forms 
of religion; ignorantly religious often, translating 
his awareness of God into forms uncouth and 
stupid to us; but religious all the same. 

And this should open our eyes to the insight 
that the actual shape taken by human life in this 
world is religious. Life has been lived with the 
Divine for its background. It is possible to argue 
that this racial awareness of God is an illusion, 
but it 1s not possible to argue that it is not a fact. 
And if it is an illusion, it is an illusion of mankind. 
For the clear suggestion of history is that irreligion 
is something occasional, private, exceptional, while 
religion is universal and human; from the historical 
standpoint, religion is the norm and irreligion an 
aberration. Behind the religious appeal, as it comes 
to us today, there stands the authority of our 
race, the authority of Man. And though this is 
no reason for belief apart from personal verification, 
it is a reason for undertaking the most serious and 
sustained investigation of the possibilities of religion. 
That which Man has known and lived by since 
first his great adventure of life in the world began 
may not by men be lightly set aside today. 

Long ago, in ancient Greece, men debated the 
question of the origin of the world. Some said it 


THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EHARTH = 53 


was an evolution of water, some said, of fire; some 
said it came of a dance of atoms. Anaxagoras 
first spoke the word ‘‘Mind,” and Plato said that 
he sounded like a sober man talking in a crowd 
of speculative drunkards. Approaching thefsame 
problem of origin from the religious standpoint, the 
Hebrew teacher wrote, “In the beginning God 
created the heavens and the earth.” The religious 
and the philosophic approaches were united in the 
saying of one of the early theologians of the Church: 
“By faith we understand that the worlds were 
framed by the Word of God, so that what is seen 
is not made of the things that do appear. “J 
believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker 
of heaven and earth,’ begins the Nicene Creed. 
These sayings all express the same essential con- 
viction, that the world of our experience if it be 
rightly interpreted, reveals itself as the work of 
intelligent Power and is, therefore, a world ex- 
pressive of reason and purpose. God is, indeed, 
the alone true light that lights up all the world; 
and that may be the reason why, though we can, 
with the idea of God, begin to construct a hopeful 
philosophy of the world, we can construct no 
satisfactory philosophy of God. We can explain 
the world through God, but we can not ‘explain 
the explanation.’”? For God is the source of light 
and any light that we seek to throw upon the 
source is swallowed up in the greater shining. It | 
is as if one took a rushlight to search for the sun. 
Our earliest forefathers caught sight of that ultimate 
Light shining dimly, a faint and far-off radiance, 


21 Heb, xi.3, 


54 SHARING IN CREATION 


and hailed it, as men hail the flush of the dawn. 
Around the wide world, from race to race and from 
land to land, in many tongues, ran the whisper: 
“Tt is Mind—as we are mind; it is our Kinsman.” 
Moving in the direction of that Light men have 
seen the world grow slowly luminous with meanings 
ever larger and purposes ever worthier of their 
service and our sacrifice. And if there are shadows 
still upon our human road and regions into which 
we can not clearly see, it is in that direction still 
that we shall find the shadows withdrawing and 
the light increasing towards the perfect day. 


CHAPTER II 
THE METHOD OF CREATION 


The word ‘‘creation,” until years comparatively 
recent, was a word into which it was not possible 
to put any very specific meaning. It was the 
name for a certain event believed to have taken 
place in the past, but of the event not even a partial 
description could be given. Faith in God as the 
Creator of the world was unable to represent to 
itself in any specific fashion the way by which 
our world has come to be. But it has come to 
pass more lately that, in the providence of God, 
unto our faith has been added some measure of 
knowledge. Within the last hundred years, study 
of the world on a vast scale by men of science 
has made it clear that all that today is, has come 
to be by a process of growth. The scientific name 
for that process is ‘‘evolution.” Evolution may 
be defined as ‘‘a process of continuous, orderly, 
and broadly progressive change, from the simple to 
the more complex, which arises as the resultant 
of various factors operating from within and from 
without.”! Evolution thus means that every present 
is the child in some sense of the past, and that it 
should be possible to describe more or less completely 
the process of change that links the two together. 


1J. Y. Simpson, The Spiritual Interpretation of Nature, new ed., p. 108. 
56 





56 SHARING IN CREATION 


Of the ultimate cause of the process, evolution, as 
a scientifie view, has nothing to say. But from the 
standpoint of Christian Theism, the establish- 
ment of this view has meant the attainment of 
specific knowledge as to some of the methods by 
which God works in the world. 


I 
CHRISTIAN THEISM AND EH; VOLUTION 


The new knowledge has become within the 
past sixty-five years a part of the very texture of 
our minds, present in all our thinking and wrought 
into all our scientific, historical, philosophical, and 
theological literature. We have been taught to 
consider all things, as Jesus taught us to consider the 
lilies of the field, ‘chow they grow.”’ But when this 
knowledge first began to make its way in the world 
great difficulty was experienced by many Christians 
in adjusting themselves to it. And since the causes 
of that difficulty continue to operate to a limited 
extent in the present, some brief reference to them 
may be made. The main causes are, perhaps, three. 

(1). There is, first, our human difficulty in 
distinguishing clearly between the form and the 
substance of a belief. It is a trick of our minds 
that once we have come to conceive a thing vividly 
in a certain fashion, we experience the utmost 
difficulty in seeing that the essence of our conception 
may be preserved in a different form. So to the 
man trained to think of government only in auto- 
cratic forms the end of an autocracy may seem to 
presage the end of government. So to men trained 
to think of the world as the center of the Universe, 


THE METHOD OF CREATION 57 


the Copernican Astronomy seemed to carry with 
it the reduction of human life to a position of per- 
manent insignificance. Indeed, it was not theologians 
alone who found the evolution theory difficult. <A 
tentative form of the theory published by Lamarck 
in 1809 was crushed by the great scientific authority 
of Cuvier; a like fate befell the version of Robert 
Chambers at the hands of Agassiz in 1844. But 
this human difficulty in reconstructing the form of 
an idea is increased tenfold when the idea has 
religious bearings; and that just because of the 
supreme importance of religion. An idea held 
lightly, with only a portion of our total selves, 
can be modified with comparative ease; the scientific 
debate that centers just now in the quantum theory 
of light does not deeply move us. It is enough for 
most of us that the sun, by whatever process, 
continues to shine. But religious ideas, rooted deep 
in the intellect, warm with emotional values, and 
closely related to the moral will, are less patient 
of modification. The intense conservatism of 
religion is, indeed, a consequence of its vital import- 
ance for us. And impatient reformers will always 
have to reckon with the fact that men will not 
lightly or hastily alter even the form of a deeply 
rooted belief. They will wish first to make quite 
sure that the belief itself can live on securely in the 
new setting. 

~  §$o to some, any alteration of the form in which 
they have always conceived the creative action of 
God has seemed to carry with it the disappearance of 
the belief itself. And that problem is solved and 
that difficulty liquidated only when such a man 


58 SHARING IN CREATION 


has come to see that his own essential faith is really 
not faith in any particular view of the process of 
creation but in God as Creator; that evolution is 
not a substitute for God but a description of the 
creative method; that his faith in God may continue 
to live and may even be strengthened by a better 
understanding of the means through which God 
works. And a pled may be entered here for all 
possible sympathy with those who find such a 
transition difficult. We are accustomed to use all 
tenderness towards the difficulties of the irreligious; 
often we seem less courteous towards the difficulties 
of the faithful. Sometimes it would almost seem 
that in our eagerness to be numbered among the 
illuminati, we forget that we are numbered among 
the Christians. What is wanted is education, not 
polemics. And in any discussion within the Church 
as to the form of her faith, the most important 
thing of all to preserve is the spirit of fellowship. 
When that is lost all verbal victories are pyrrhic 
victories—they convince nobody and leave the 
situation not better but worse. 

(2). A second cause of difficulty may be found 
in an idea of God’s relation with the world that is 
deistic rather than theistic. Deism, the character- 
istic philosophy of the eighteenth century, conceived 
God and the world as completely outside each 
other, and the standpoint survives on a large scale 
into our own time. Where this outlook controls, 
God is understood to be altogether remote from the 
world and His contacts with it are limited to occa- 
sional interferences with the order of Nature. God 
thus becomes just a synonym for the unusual and 


THE METHOD OF CREATION 59 


the supernatural, and the discovery of any closely 
linked chain of natural causes is a sign, so far, of 
the absence of God. Because God has first been 
isolated from Nature, the natural is identified with 
the undivine. And since God is to be found only 
in the unintelligible, it follows that every advance 
of science excludes God from just so much of the 
world process. Newton’s law of gravity was attacked 
on precisely this ground: “Newton,” it was said, 
“has removed God from his universe and put a 
law in his place.”’ And the attack was severely 
logical, given the standpoint from which it was 
made. For under a deistic view of the world the 
discovery of how any natural process goes on con- 
tracts to that extent the sphere of God’s action, 
so that not only the theory of evolution but all 
progress of science is a progressive loss of God. 
For is not God just the Power who does the things 
which Nature can not and does not do? So, God 
and Nature being thus treated as mutually exclusive, 
the assertion that the world has come to be what 
it is by a process of natural growth is equivalent to 
a denial that it is the creation of God. Evolution 
is just another name for atheism. 

For result there has been raised in the minds 
of a number of men the false dilemma—treligion or 
science. And different horns of the dilemma have 
been chosen by different men. Some have chosen 
religion, rejecting science; others, with the same 
understanding of the situation, have chosen science 
and abandoned religion as incompatible with in- 
tellectual integrity. Others still have avoided the 
dilemma by keeping their religion and their science 


60 SHARING IN CREATION 


in separate compartments. This last, however, is 
a temporary evasion of the problem, not a solution. 
The only real solution lies in the rediscovery of 
God as universally present and active in the world, 
in taking seriously the Christian Doctrine of God 
as immanent Holy Spirit. This is the typical 
Biblical view. It is God who makes the grass to 
grow upon the mountains, even though we can 
discover the laws of its growth; it is God who clothes 
the lilies of the field for all that their beauty is 
but the natural outcome of a physical process. 
He makes the sun to rise, and He is the patient 
Gardener who waters the earth with the slow- 
dropping rain. ‘‘When the evidence of both Testa- 
ments is considered, the kernel of their teaching 
must be found in the effective energy of the Divine 
will . . . . continually at work throughout the 
entire series of natural changes.’”? 

From this standpoint God is to be found first 
of all not beyond but within Nature. The sharp 
antithesis between the natural and the supernatural 
disappears, and the natural, the usual, the regular, 
is rediscovered as the home and expression of God. 
The natural, if by “the natural’ we mean the 
regular and methodical, is itself filled with the 
supernatural, if by the supernatural we mean the 
spiritual, the Divine. The vast continuities of 
Nature constitute the very method and revelation 
of God creative, and Law is but the sign of rational 
Purpose, steadily and inflexibly pursued. “As long 
as the view is held that God is not present in natural 

2J.O. Dykes, The Divine Worker in Creation and Providence, p. 89. 


THE METHOD OF CREATION 61 


laws, the conflict between science and theology 
must continue... . But if he is in all law, 
then he is in the world as much, yes, more than 
ever; and every blazing autumn hedge is really 
the burning bush out of whose midst the Omni- 
present speaks, every clod is sacred ground, every 
day is a holy day, and we all live in the constant 
presence of Deity.’’® 

“The one absolutely impossible conception of 
God, in the present day,’’ wrote Aubrey Moore, 
thirty-five years ago, ‘is that which represents 
him as an occasional Visitor . . . . Either God 
is everywhere present in nature or he is nowhere. 
We must frankly return to the Christian view 
of . . . . the immanence of Divine power in 
nature from end to end. It seems as if, in the 
providence of God, the mission of modern science 
was to bring home to our unmetaphysical ways of 
thinking the great truth of the Divine immanence 
in creation, which is not less essential to the Christian 
idea of God than to a philosophical view of nature.’’4 

(3). The third main cause of difficulty is to be 
found in a very widespread assumption that the 
scientific doctrine of evolution is inseparable from 
a particular sort of philosophy known as Mater- 
ialism or Naturalism. The confusion of these two 
quite different things in the popular mind is, 1t must 
be confessed, not wholly without excuse. For 
when the new scientific facts began to be generally 
known, Naturalism, being troubled by no religious 


8H. G. Conklin, The Direction of Human Evolution, pp. 212-13, 
4Iux Mundi, p. 82. 


62 SHARING IN CREATION 


inhibitions, promptly took them over and worked 
them into its familiar view of the world. The earlier 
and most striking interpretations of evolution were 
thus made in terms of Naturalistic philosophy. And 
though Naturalism is only one philosophy among 
many, and though the same facts will bear other 
interpretations equally well or better, yet it stood 
forth for a time as the accredited philosophic counter- 
part of the scientific view of the world. Evolution, 
interpreted, thus seemed to issue in Naturalism, with 
its characteristic denial of the reality of God and 
of the freedom and immortality of man. ‘‘Material- 
ism,” it has been pointedly said, ‘‘put on the lion’s 
skin of science, and not every one realized that the 
voice that came from under it was the voice not of 
science, but only of that old, pestiferous, philosophic 
donkey, Materialism.”’ 

But Naturalism is a philosophy, not a science; 
it is but one interpretation of the world among many, 
not an assured result of scientific investigation. 
And, like all philosophies, it must be judged by its 
comparative power to make sense of the total facts 
that enter our experience and its ability to meet the 
needs of our life. And the only effective answer to 
it is the construction of a better philosophy which 
includes the spiritual as well as the physical facts 
and interprets more adequately the whole. It is 
probably true to say that the main currents of 
thought in recent years have moved in the direction 
of such a better interpretation. The danger that 
Naturalism, with its elimination of God and Purpose 
from the world, should establish itself permanently 


THE METHOD OF CREATION 63 


as the proper philosophy of science, may be said to 
have passed. ‘“‘We know,” says A. J. Balfour, 
“too much about matter to be materialists any 
longer.” And if one salient feature of our time is 
the increasing application to religious problems of 
the knowledge won by science, surely another is the 
increasing appreciation by scientific men of the 
spiritual meanings latent in their physical knowl- 
edge. Scientific experience, fully interpreted, means 
God quite as really as the sort of experience that is 
specifically called religious; when we put together 
the letters that the special sciences have picked out 
from the Book of Nature, we find that they spell 
the Name that is above every name. - And while a 
philosophy that is at once adequately scientific 
and adequately religious is still only in the process. 
of being worked out, yet already its outlines begin 
to be clear—and the outlines are familiar ones. 
“Behind all phenomena,” writes President Pritchett 
of the Carnegie Foundation, ‘‘of a physical universe 
infinite in extent, whose existence goes back to a 
time limitless in duration, the man of science recog- 
nizes an infinite and eternal power, the author and 
sustainer of the universe, in whom we live and move 
and have our being . . . . The man of science rests 
secure in the faith that he lives in a universe sus- 
tained by an infinite power, whose laws make for 
righteousness and progress. Such a man looks, 
therefore, hopefully and confidently not only upon 
the physical processes of nature, but upon the prog- 
ress of his own race. . . . He has faith that he who 
through millions of years has brought us up—it 


64 SHARING IN CREATION 


may be slowly and painfully—will lead us gradually 
into a stronger, nobler life in this world. Science 
has faith in God and in human progress.’’® 

The familiar story of the two shields, told more 
than once in this connection, is pertinent still. Two 
men fell a-disputing whether the shield of a passing 
knight was white or black. These are they who see 
creation and evolution as opposites. A third by- 
stander suggested that the shield was probably grey. 
He is the compromiser who suggests that evolution 
is a “natural”? process interrupted by occasional 
creative invasions. God may be discovered in 
action at the beginning, in the origin of life, in the 
origin of man; elsewhere soulless mechanism is in 
full control. But the compromiser was the only 
man completely wrong, for the shield was really 
completely white on one side and black on the other. 
So what is wanted here is not compromise but 
synthesis. Looked at from the scientific side the 
world is all process; looked at from the side of in- 
terpretative philosophy, it is all God. And it has 
come to be neither by creation at a stroke, nor by 
“natural” process alone, nor yet by alternating 
creation and process, but by creation through proc- 
ess. For the course of evolution, to the eye trained 
to read off the spiritual meanings of events, is itself 
quick with Mind and definite with Purpose. And 
the false antithesis between creation and evolution 
disappears in the insight that evolution has within 
it God creatively at work. Our new scientific knowl- 
edge really means for the Christian religion mainly 

5 Quo. Prof. Lull, in Christianity and Modern Thought, p. 55. . 





THE METHOD OF CREATION 65 


this: that whereas we were before completely agnos- 
tic as to God’s creative method, we have now gained 
some small insight into it. And this means in turn 
that we should be able the better to co-operate with 
it. Patient study of the actual concrete processes 
of physical, moral, social and religious growth should 
reveal specific points at which our co-operation is 
needed and can be used. A better understanding 
of God at work should increase our power of working 
intelligently with God. And, perhaps, the most 
important consequence of evolution for the Chris- 
tian is to be found in the recognition that God is 
giving us more exact knowledge because He is 
demanding of us a more skilful co-operation. He 
that would serve wisely the purpose of God in the 
world dare close his eyes to nothing that throws 
light upon God’s own way of moving toward His end. 

The immediate Christian task, so far as the as- 
sured results of science are concerned, is to read off the 
lessons that they contain of the ways and purposes 
of God. And the experiences of our fellow Christians 
in earlier centuries—so often finding in that which 
at first seemed only darkness an ampler light—assure 
us that if we give ourselves candidly to this task, 
we need not fear the result. The words of Lord 
Bacon, true so often in past time, will be found to 
be true again: ‘I dare affirm in knowledge of Nature 
that a little Natural Philosophy [7.e. Science] and 
the first entrance into it doth dispose the opinion to 
atheism; but, on the other side, much Natural 
Philosophy and wading deep into it, will bring about 
men’s minds to religion.’’® 

§ Meditationes Sacra., x. 





66 SHARING IN CREATION 
II 
Man’s Piuace In NATURE 


The specially critical point in this connection, 
however, has been the question as to the bearing of 
the new scientific knowledge upon the Christian view 
of man. At the center of that Christian view lies 
the conviction that man is the kinsman of God, made 
by God in His own image, possessing therefore an 
absolute value for God. Man is of central import- 
ance in the world, the chief end for which it exists, 
having dominion over all things that be upon the 
earth. Throughout the larger part of Christian 
history this valuation of man was felt to be in full 
harmony with current science. In the days”of the 
geocentric astronomy the earth that is his home, 
was regarded as the center not only of the solar 
system but of the universe. It swung in stately 
fashion in space with the rest of creation for its 
attendant. ‘‘The stars existed to shine upon it, the 
sun and moon to give it light by day and by night, 
the other planets were its handmaidens.” It had 
been created in a brief period of time solely to be 
man’s dwelling-place. It had no history of its own 
before the appearance of man; it had been made 
swiftly, as one builds a house while the future occu- 
pant is waiting to move in, and the purposeful con- 
nection was as clear in the one case as in the other. 
Indeed, the universe began, practically, with and 
for man, and theology and science united to affirm 
his central importance and supreme value. 

But the comfortable assurance of man’s special 
value was destined to run the gauntlet of a searching 


THE METHOD OF CREATION 67 


criticism. And the two most severe attacks came 
from the Copernican astronomy and from the theory 
of evolution. First, Copernicus showed that the 
earth is not the stable center of the universe, but is 
rather only a single unit in one of its many separate 
groupings. Our solar system can be regarded as 
only one flying squadron among an inconceivably 
great number of similar systems. ‘‘There is grandeur 
in the spectacle of the star-strewn sky, so apparently 
crowded, but there are thousands of worlds unseen 
for every one that our unaided eyes can image, and 
yet the astronomers tell us that the emptiness of 
space is its most striking characteristic. We are 
staggered by the fact that when we look at Alpha 
Centauri which lies some ten billions of miles nearer 
to us than any other known star, we see it not as it 
is tonight, but as it was four years ago... if the 
sun were represented in a model by a grain of sand 
one hundredth of an inch in diameter, and the 
earth by a quite invisible speck one inch away, the 
nearest star would be represented on this scale by 
another grain of sand some four miles off.’’? The 
boundaries of space have, indeed, rushed away in all 
directions, and the earth, in the light of these revela- 
tions, has seemed rapidly to shrivel and shrink like 
a toy balloon pricked with a pin. 

What astronomy has done for our conception 
of space, evolution has done for our conception of 
time. The geologist and the biologist have descended 
the long avenue of the ages and unveiled reaches of 
time so vast that the imagination refuses to grasp 
them. They return to tell us of a world much the 


7J. A, Thomson, System of Animate Nature, pp. 30-31. 





68 SHARING IN CREATION 


larger part of whose history was enacted before man 
ever appeared upon the scene. Man seems, indeed, 
of a date so absurdly recent that the oldest family of 
New England or Virginia must needs yield social 
precedence, if antiquity be the test, to the youngest 
of the animal clans. ‘They insist, too, that man 
stands in organic connection with the rest of animal 
creation, his ancestry tracing back through Cro- 
Magnon, Neanderthal, Piltdown, and Heidelberg 
Man to Pithecanthropus Erectus and the gener- 
alized family of Hominidae, which diverged from the 
Anthropoid Apes, perhaps, a million years ago. It 
has seemed to many that these unwelcome genealo- 
gists are degrading man in thus associating him in 
close kinship with the lower orders of life. And so are 
raised the two questions of the bearing first of astron- 
omy, and, second, of evolution upon the value of man. 

To possess oneself of new insights without losing 
grasp on old ones seems to be one of the most difficult 
tasks in the world. But to learn to do just that is 
the special task of the trained man, the man trained 
to think not hastily and scrappily but patiently and 
comprehensively. And such a man should know 
enough history to be able to remind himself that the 
most obvious consequences are not necessarily the 
right ones. A great English family has for its motto: 
‘“‘Wayte awhile. Wayte awhile.”’ It is a good motto 
for the thinker. 

But waiting awhile and thinking in the interim 
seems often but a dull business. And at first blush it 
seemed to many people that the expansion of the 
Universe carried with it, for its inevitable corollary, 
the contraction of the significance of man. Could 


THE METHOD OF CREATION 69 


it be that the inhabitants of so obscure a corner of 
a cosmos so immense were of any special importance 
to anybody, even assuming that there was Anybody 
who might conceivably take an interest in them? 
Was it not much more likely that the race of man 
was no more than a cosmic accident, a feeble and 
transitory flash of life and love struck out for a 
moment in the midst of the august immensities and 
eternities? And did not Celsus really express the 
truth of the human situation when he compared 
Christians to ants crawling about their anthill and: 
imagining themselves objects of interest to God? 
So the old question of the eighth psalm: 


When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy 
fingers, 

The moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; 

What is man that thou art mindful of him? 


may be given a sceptical turn. Indeed, I suppose 
that most of us have at one time or another felt the 
pressure of the problem, as we have realized in 
imagination the scale of the system to which we 
belong. It is in such a mood that A. J. Balfour 
writes: ‘The feeling of trusting dependence, which 


was so easy to primitive tribes, . . . is not so 
easy to us. . . . We search out God with eyes 
grown old with studying Nature .... and 


imaginations glutted by material infinites. . . 
The overwhelming force and regularity of the great 
natural movements dull the sharp impression of an 
ever-present Personality deeply concerned in our 
spiritual well-being.’’® 

8 Foundations of Belief, p. 356. 





70 SHARING IN CREATION 


There is no real reason, however, why a man 
should allow himself to be overawed by the mere 
bulk of things. And the occasional tendency towards 
undue humility in the presence of the universe may 
be corrected by the recognition that there are two 
entirely distinct scales by which we measure things, 
a scale of physical measurements and a scale of 
values. The physical scale is the one habitually 
used by science; its units are units of length, mass, 
weight, energy, etc., and physical science, as such, 
knows nothing of values. This does not at all mean, 
of course, that scientists are insensible to value, but 
only that within the special sphere of science value- 
judgments do not apply. Therefore when we say, 
“Man is not important because the universe is so 
big,’ we are confusing utterly the two standards 
of measurement. We are measuring both man and 
the universe by the yard and, of course, the Universe 
has come out tremendously ahead. But if the size 
were the measure of value, then a very small 
mountain ought to be worth any number of very 
large diamonds. And if a man feels small beside 
the universe, he ought to feel small beside the 
nearest hill.® After the first few thousand yards or 
pounds, a few billion more should make little differ- 
ence. 

The fact ef the matter is that the significance 
of man has never really depended upon either the 
location of his world in the universe or upon his 
own physical importance, but upon his interior life. 
And when we substitute reflection for the mere 
exercise of the physical imagination, when we shift 

Cf. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 110-12. 





THE METHOD OF CREATION 71 


our thinking from the physical to the spiritual key, 
we get at once a more accurate view. For man can 
weigh the sun and measure the stars; he can say 
to the mountain, ‘‘Be thou removed and cast into 
the sea,’’ and it is done. Nor does he live only on 
the earth and in the present. With his telescopes 
and photographic plates and still more in the opera- 
tions of his mind, he dwells, in a real sense, in all 
the universe. He can reconstruct the past and, with 
some security, retrace his steps through all recorded 
time; can hear Plato lecturing in the groves of 
Athens or watch the amoeba beginning the long 
ascent of life. Through his power of framing ideals 
and working out their realization he can even lay 
strong hands upon the future and determine, in 
part, what it shall be. It is man’s spiritual nature, 
not his size, that is the measure of his worth. 
And the psalmist gave the right answer to the 
question, ‘‘What is man that thou art mindful of 
him?” when he said, “‘Thou hast made him but 
little lower than the angels.’ When Thomas 
Huxley’s child lay gravely ill, he said that he realized 
for the first time that all the physical universe, the 
subject matter of his science, was not worth to him 
the life of his child. There is nothing in the world 
which God does not value, said Jesus, though it be 
two sparrows, sold for a farthing, but as for you who 
are his children, “‘the very hairs of your heads are 
all numbered.” 

Nor is it right that we should measure even the 
physical universe with physical units alone. It is 
true that the universe of modern science, if it were 
empty of all spiritual life and vacant of all spiritual 


72 SHARING IN. CREATION 


meaning, were an imaginative horror. But the 
meaning of the Christian doctrine of creation is 
just that the physical universe is essentially a 
spiritual universe, its origin spiritual, its aims 
spiritual. And for Christian folk the discovery of 
its magnitude should be but the revelation that the 
works of spirit are vaster than we had imagined, 
that we are members of a spiritual system grander 
than we had dreamed, and are moving towards 
destinies more alluringly interesting than we had 
dared to hope. It is to find that we must mean by 
the word ‘‘God” something even more august than 
we had thought and can say with a new fullness of 
meaning, ‘“The heavens declare the glory of God and 
the firmament showeth his handiwork.” Humility 
remains, indeed; but it is a humility that elates 
rather than depresses. It is the humility and the 
elation of discovering that we are called to be sharers 
in a spiritual enterprise too great for any man to 
measure—and too great for any man to refuse. i 

Turning now to look at man from the stand- 
point of evolution, it is first to be noted that the 
process as a whole has two marked features. It 
maintains throughout a certain continuity; and yet 
there emerge in it things that seem to be definitely 
new and different from all that has gone before. It 
is a continuous process in which there appear things 
that were not obviously implicit in what preceded. 
“The facts of growth, when disinterestedly studied, 
do reveal changes which we ought to regard as 
changes of kind, and indeed of a kind very material 
to the interpretation of evolution, of the position 
of mind in reality, and of the future possibilities of 


THE METHOD OF CREATION 73 


man.’””? Thus the inorganic gives birth to the 
organic and in the world of life, non-living matter 
is not dispensed with but still continues to hold a 
place. But life is more than just another of the forms 
of matter; it displays new qualities, nor can it be 
refunded into matter unless we discard its charac- 
teristic qualities or else assume that vital qualities 
reside in matter. Again, spiritual life, personal 
life, emerges out of the organic world, and in the 
spiritual world, organisms are not dispensed with 
but continue to hold a place. Spirit is embodied 
spirit. But spirit, again, has its own characteristic 
qualities and can not be stepped down to the merely 
vital level without leaving these qualities behind. 
“Continuity of process and the emergence of real 
differences—these are, in short, the twin aspects 
of the cosmic history, and it is essential to clear 
thinking that the one be not allowed to obscure the 
other.’’!1 

Twin aspects are they also of the particular 
history of man. His life is first of all plainly con- 
tinuous with all that went before and 2s below him. 
His personal life is rooted and grounded in matter, 
his thinking is conditioned by brain cells, and 
physico-chemical laws direct in part the movements 
of his body. And to the eye of science the organism 
in which he lives is filled with indications of its 
origin. This is not the place to present the evidence 
—we must go to the books of science for that—but 
there is ample reason for believing that the present 
form of the human body has been slowly worked 





10 Hobhouse, Development and Purpose, p. 10. 
11 Pringle-Pattison, Idea of God in Recent Philosophy,"p. 103. 


74 SHARING IN CREATION 


out through a long process extending over many 
ages. And it is certain that there is mental as well 
as bodily continuity; the life of the mind has also 
its prefigurings and foreshadowings in the lesser 
lives that preceded it. Behind man’s social ideals 
and instincts stand the earlier animal groupings; 
behind his rational will stand the less purposeful 
thrusts and strivings of the lower forms of life; 
behind his ambitions and his sacrifices stand the 
hunger and love of all animate creation. 

But if there is continuity, there is also difference. 
And here we need to pause again, for a moment, 
over the general idea of evolution. It is very apt 
to be popularly understood as meaning just endless, 
indefinite, random change in the course of which, 
if time enough be allowed, anything may turn into 
anything else, butterflies into elephants or modern 
monkeys into modern men. But there seems to be 
no reason for supposing that the tree of life, as it 
is rooted in this planet, is capable of endless, in- 
definite growth. The suggestion of the facts, if I 
understand them aright, rather is that organic 
growth is, indeed, like that of a tree—a tree growing 
from a seed which contains such and such possibilities 
and no more. If you plant an acorn, its subsequent 
growth is the working out of its specific possibilities 
in its particular environment. So it would seem 
to be with our earthly system of animate nature. 
We can best think of it as engaged in the exploita- 
tion of the definite and not absolutely unlimited 
possibilities of life in this world. And if this be 
true, then to describe organic evolution as random, 
indefinite change is to substitute imagining in 


THE METHOD OF CREATION 75 


vacuo for thinking in close relation with the facts. 
It should rather be described, scientifically, as the 
rendering explicit of the possibilities of life latent 
in this world-system, or theistically, as the working 
out on earth of a definite divine purpose and plan. 
Indeed, there is reason for thinking particular lines 
of growth, when their possibilities have been fully 
explored, tend to come to an end. ‘The climax of 
reptilian growth occurred long ago in the Jurassic 
period, and animal size and strength reached its 
climax with the Dinosaurs just as man was coming 
on the scene.!2 There is no more reason today for 
supposing that any living animal could ever evolve 
into a man than that man could involve into a pine- 
cone. Evolution is evolution, not magic. 

Now this conception of evolution as the work- 
ing out of specific possibilities has immediate 
practical bearings. There are, of course, highly 
significant differences between man and the animals 
—his upright posture, his brain, twice the size of 
that of the chimpanzee, the complicated cortex 
with its 9000 millions of cells. The earlier evolu- 
tionists were so intent upon emphasizing the con- 
tinuity of man with the past, that they “blurred,” 
as Prof. Thomson has said, “our appreciation of 
man’s apartness.”” But it does not, after all, take 
a skillful scientist to tell a man fromia gorilla. And 


12 “Tt ig difficult to criticize away the impression that the days of big lifts are 
over. It is a remarkable fact that the Silurian rocks contain fossil remains of most 
of the great groups or phyla of backboneless animals, and likewise representatives 
of backboned animals in the form of fishes, All the big groups or phyla appeared 
many millions of years ago, and there has been no new class of animals since 
mammals appeared in the Triassic and birds in the Jurassic” (J. A. Thomson, 
What is Man, pp. 293-4). 


76 SHARING IN CREATION 


man is, undoubtedly, the de facto lord of the world, 
having dominion over all things that be upon the 
earth. 

Moreover, there is good reason for believing 
that he is not only the highest form of life but that 
he is also the climactic form. This seems to be the 
case even on the physical side. There is first the 
fact, already noted, that he has won the actual 
mastery of the earth and would probably be able to 
cut off early any development that seemed likely 
to dispute his supremacy. And, secondly, there 
is the more significant fact that past physical suc- 
cesses seem in him to come to a sort of focus or 
synthesis. For through his power of making for 
himself tools and machines he has become swifter 
than the stag; with telescope and microscope, eyes 
specially designed to see far and to see small, his 
vision is better than the eagle’s; he can hear with 
his microphone the rustle of the distant propeller 
beneath the seas; he is stronger than ever was the 
mastodon and more dangerous than the sabre- 
tooth tiger. For in these latter years he has been 
learning rapidly how to harness up the elemental 
motive forces of his world and set them to serve his 
ends. He has added to the strength of his arm the 
strength of the river, he has multiplied his power 
with the power of electricity, he has rubbed his head 
in painful thought, as Aladdin rubbed his ring, and, 
for result, enslaved the nature giants and made 
them servants of his will. So to man, on his phy- 
sical side, all roads of development seem to lead; 
into his hand all the strings of power are gathering. 


THE METHOD OF CREATION 77 


And if it be not possible to offer demonstrative proof 
that there will not arise upon the earth a creature 
higher than man, yet it is fair to say that the avail- 
able evidence points overwhelmingly in that direc- 
tion. ‘Science is as emphatic as ever scripture was 
in declaring that man is the final outcome of the 
physical process—not simply as its latest phenome- 
non but as the final issue of the whole.’’!4 

When we turn to the spiritual side of human 
life, facts more significant still come into view. 
There came a day somewhere, somehow, in the his- 
tory of life when ‘psychical changes became of 
more importance than physical changes,’ when 
intelligence began to be more valuable than strength. 
And that moment opened a new chapter in the Book 
of Life. Henceforth the life of the soul becomes 
primary and the bodily life secondary, and the 
genesis of species makes way for the progress of 
civilization. For in man the Logos, the Reason, of 
which we catch glimpses in nature, becomes explicit 
and self-conscious—man begins to live not by bread 
alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
mouth of God. Instinct, the great guide of life on 
the sub-human level, is replaced by conceptual 
thought as the controlling factor, and instinctive 
striving is replaced by purposeful will, capable of 
responding to rational ideals. In man, too, Nature 
gets herself an interpreter, a being who can study 
her processes, reflect upon them, and read off, in 
some measure, their meaning. The coming of man 
means the beginning of a philosophy of nature— 

13 Gwatkin, Knowledge of God, vol. ii, p. 88 





78 SHARING IN CREATION 


the world now begins to be understood. And finally, 
in man, conscious contact is made and personal re- 
lations begin to be established between the natural 
process and the Power at work init. For with man 
Religion is born, and religion means a world aware 
of God and capable of conscious co-operation with 
Him. And that opens out a possibility of future 
growth to which no limits can be set. Said 
Browning: 

All tended to mankind 

And, man produced, all has its end thus far: 


But in completed man begins anew 
A tendency towards God.!4 


Considerations of this sort lead Thomson to 
say that ‘‘Man at his best who reasons and thinks 
about his thinking, who bends Nature to his will, 
who seeks after the True, the Beautiful and the 
Good with all his heart and soul and strength, is a 
being singularly apart.’’% 

‘Two conclusions would seem to emerge, if these 
considerations are valid. First, man fulfils the 
past history of the earth. This does not of course 
mean that we should regard our race as the sole and 
only end of creation even on this planet. There is 
no reason for denying to other children of Nature 
a real value of their own not dependent upon their 
relation to mankind. There is the best of biblical 
authority for thinking that God is fond of birds for 
their own sake. But it does seem that in the human 
race we have “the fullest expression of what nature 
seems to make for,’”’ her consummating and co-ordi- 


“4 Paracelsus. 
15 System, etc., p. 554. 


THE METHOD OF CREATION 79 


nating type, ‘‘the heir of all the ages.” ‘‘The doc- 
trine of evolution shows us for the first time how the 
creation and perfecting of man is the goal towards 
which nature’s work has tended from the beginning. 
We can now see clearly that our new knowledge 
enlarges tenfold the significance of human life and 
makes it seem more than ever the object of Divine 
care—the consummate fruition of that creative 
energy which is manifested throughout the Know- 
able Cosmos.’ And, second, while we can not 
but feel that man himself is as yet only in the proc- 
ess of being born, having gathered, thus far, as 
St. Paul said, but the first fruits of the possibilities 
of spiritual life, yet so far as we can see, he holds 
the keys of the future. The most hopeful thing 
we can say about ourselves is, indeed, just this— 
that we are only in the process of being created. It 
is true of us in comparison with stone, or tree, or 
perfected organism, as Browning wrote of Old 
Pictures in Florence: 
Today’s brief passion limits their range; 
It breathes with tomorrow for us and more. 


They are perfect—how else? They shall never change; 
We are faulty—why not? We have time in store. 


The Artificer’s hand is not arrested 
With us; we are rough-hewn, nowise polished. 

The evolutionary process may, of course, be, 
read in either one of two ways. One may attempt, 
with philosophy of the Naturalistic sort, to read it 
downward and backward, stressing the elements of 
continuity and neglecting the elements of difference, 

16 John Fiske, Destiny of Man, p. 107. 





80 SHARING IN CREATION 


verbally refunding spirit into the merely vital and 
the vital into the material. Thus at the end it 
appears that man is only a kind of animal and that 
animals are only cases of matter in motion. But it 
can be read in this fashion only by a series of mental 
tours de force in which, at each successive simplifi- 
cation, all that was most distinctive of the stage 
above is left behind. Such simplifications are of 
the sort we used to shudder at in the stories of old 
Russia. Someone would start across the snowy 
steppes in a sleigh filled with children. Pursued by 
ravenous wolves, he would throw overboard one 
child after another until the sleigh was empty. Not 
less ruthless are the Naturalistic efforts to reach 
mechanical simplicity by firmly disregarding vital 
differences. One can work back from spirit to 
matter, indeed, but only at the cost of throwing over- 
board all that we mean by spirit. 

But the process may be read, and more reason- 
ably read, forward and upward in the direction in 
which it has actually moved. And taken in this 
fashion it would seem that so far from Nature’s 
explaining man it is man rather, who explains 
Nature.” That man,a spiritual being, is born of 
Nature, really means not that man is entirely phy- 
sical, but that Nature is essentially spiritual. The 
birth of man reveals the spirituality of Nature, and 
that he should possess reason and conscience means 
that Nature has always had reason and conscience 
in her heart. ‘Man,’ said St. Chrysostom, ‘‘is the 
true Shekinah, the visible dwelling place of the 


17 ‘‘We must interpret the nature of nature as much by the flowers as by the 
law of gravitation.”” Bosanquet, Principle of Individuality and Value. 





THE METHOD OF CREATION 81 


Divine.” The more certain it is that man is Nature’s 
child the better the reasons for believing that Nature 
is herself the work of God. Thus the inference 
sometimes drawn by the older evolutionists that 
because Nature has produced him, man is ‘‘only” a 
product of Nature was wrong with a completeness 
not often attained even by the most hasty inferences. 
It was as if one had dully urged that because a bird 
flew out from a tree, a bird was only a queer kind of 
leaf, when the real meaning was that a bird-nest 
was hidden among the leaves.’ ,The true logic 
of evolution is not that the human spirit is but a 
fashion of matter but that matter was never merely 
material. 

Nor does it seem that the process by which 
man has come to his present estate, degrades him. 
Rather it ennobles him. He who ponders the mak- 
ing of man with even a little scientific knowledge, 
will find imagination fired as he considers from what 
lands and climes and atmospheres his parts have 
been drawn together—how many creatures have 
labored at his creation, how many forgotten lives 
live in his living. And if he should feel contempt for 
all that is below him and would willingly forget the 
travail of which he was born, is he better than an 
unintelligent nouveau riche who has got up in the 
world just far enough to be ashamed of his poor 
relations. The real nobleman whose position is 
secure is always prepared, with St. Francis of Assisi, 
to acknowledge the tie of blood and call the birds his 
kinsmen. And surely the last outcome of that tre- 
mendous process of change and experiment and 


18 Cf, Pringle-Pattison, Idea of God, pp. 83, 106, 110. 


82 SHARING IN CREATION 


effort that fills the ages, ought not to feel himself 
other than dignified by the history of his genesis. 
For if our interpretation is right, the story of the 
making of the world is all, from beginning to end, 
essentially the story of the making of man. Itisa 
drama which has for its theme the creation and 
release of the spiritual. And at the end of all our 
biology we must write with deepened emphasis 
those far-sighted words of St. Paul: ‘“‘The earnest 
expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing 
of the sons of God .... For we know that the 
whole creation groaneth and travaileth together 
until now.’’!9 

‘‘And not only so,” St. Paul continues, “but 
we ourselves also, which have the first-fruits of the 
Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves.” 
Aye, there’s the rub. ‘‘We are rough-hewn, nowise 
polished.” And without this reflection the picture 
is not complete. The story of the making of man 
is not a cause for pride—very little of it is our own 
doing—but rather for thankful humility. And the 
moral corollary of the supremacy of man is not 
privilege but responsibility. It is the responsibility 
that belongs to the standard-bearer of the forces of 
life. The biological history of our race may, indeed, 
be interpreted basely as an invitation to license, or 
nobly as a summons to spiritual effort. We may 
find in it an invitation to release the ancient beast 
or an appeal to create the new man in the image of 
Jesus Christ. It is enough, perhaps, that the animal 
should be an animal, but that man should live as 
an animal were to betray all that human and animal 


LYRom, viii.19,22. 


THE METHOD OF CREATION 83 


life together have struggled to win. That were to 
flee the battle of spirit; that were treachery inside 
the camp of life. And if one should ask why he 
ought to seek and serve the spiritual, here is at 
least one out of many possible answers. The call 
to worthy living is an appeal not to make vain the 
travail of the past; it is an appeal to help carry 
forward the Flag of the World. Noblesse oblige. 


III 
Tur IDEA OF CREATION 


It follows from the preceding sections that the 
word creation names for us a continuing activity of 
God. Our world is an unfinished world. This 
insight enables us to take somewhat more seriously 
than we often do the Christian thought of God as 
the supreme active Agent working tirelessly within 
its processes, a soldier in all its battles, a partner 
in all its worthy undertakings. “‘My Father,” said 
Jesus, ““worketh until now and I work.’ Thus in 
the phrase, “Maker of Heaven and earth,” the 
word, ‘‘maker’’ describes for us a present as well as 
a past activity. We mean that we believe in a God 
who has been making and who makes the world. 
Nor is such an interpretation the contradiction of 
the creed but rather its elucidation. The Christian 
faith has never been faith in the permanence of the 
scientific views of any particular age, but only in 
the permanence of the creatorship of God. 

If we seek to express for ourselves more exactly 
the “how” of the origination of the world through 


84. SHARING IN CREATION 


the agency of God, we find that two types of de- 
scription have been current in the history of thought 
—emanation and creation. ‘The main difference 
between the two terms would seem to lie in the 
greater and less suggestion of personal, and there- 
fore rational and purposeful, action that they carry. 
The term emanation suggests processes automatic, 
inevitable, below the level of consciousness. It 
sets us thinking of mist rising from a river, of cells 
dividing and subdividing, of “the way in which 
lower organisms propagate themselves’; of the 
successive explosions of a sky-rocket. We use the 
term when we wish to reduce the suggestion of 
personal and identifiable authorship to a minimum— 
‘The impression,’ we say, ‘“‘was allowed to emanate 
from the State Department.” It has been commonly 
used in connection with philosophies of the Pan- 
theistic sort—of Plotinus, of Spinoza, of the Indian 
teachers of the Vedanta In systems of this kind 
the process of world-becoming ‘is conceived as a 
series of diversifications or modifications taking place 
within the being of God, and the world itself is no 
more than an extension of the Divine life. As a 
river in flood, overflowing its banks, spreads out 
temporarily into numberless small streams, so the 
currents of Divine energy are diversified into the 
things and individuals that constitute our world. 
But the seeming individualities are to be regarded 
as more or less illusory; after all, they are only parts 
of the river, and back into the river they find their 
way at last to be lost in its unending flow. ‘‘As 
the flowing rivers disappear in the sea, losing their 
name and form,” says one of the Indian Upanishads 


THE METHOD OF CREATION 85 


“thus a wise man, freed from name and form, goes 
to the Divine.” 

Essentially of this sort, whatever may be the 
language used, are all types of philosophy that 
teach us to think of the world of life as being no 
more than the projection into time of the will of 
God, of the succession of earthly events as being 
no more than the execution of divine decrees. It 
is true that such systems have often been invested 
with a religious value; they have been used to support 
the assurance that the world is within the control 
of God. But if their consequences be fully thought 
out it will always be discovered that they assure 
the control of God by cancelling the meaning of 
life and the reality of the world. History loses its 
significance and becomes no more than the playing 
off of a piece of music already written, wherein sin 
is but the discordant element needed to bring out 
the vaster harmonies of the whole. And our several 
lives have no more individual value than have the 
separate notes in some great symphony. It has 
been well said that the chief difficulty with Spinoza’s 
philosophy is that there is no room in it for Spinoza. 
It is vain to seek to secure the salvation of man by 
destroying him. 

The word creation, on the other hand, is full 
of personal associations. It is grounded in our own 
experience of forming plans and working for their 
realization in definite ways. Creation suggests 
conscious purpose in the process of being realized 
through the activity of will. And it has within it 
the light of the suggestive analogies of creative 
literature, art, invention—indeed, of every sort of 


86 _SHARING IN CREATION 


human activity in which, through the putting forth 
of spiritual effort, something is actualized and given 
objective form—is given a certain individuality and 
made to stand off from ourselves, while yet remain- 
ing dependent upon us.” While such analogies 
are not, of course, complete, since we work always 
in a given material, yet they do cast at least a gleam 
of light and render the conception of creation less 
opaque than it would otherwise be. So the term 
creation points us for the final explanation of the 
world to Personal Will, bestowing real, if dependent, 
existence upon material things, and giving to man 
that self-hood and relative independence which is 
the actual and experimental shape and form of his 
life. And the justification of the word lies in the 
fact that it interprets and illuminates, if it does not 
completely explain, the concrete experience of 
life. 

It is perhaps possible, without completely 
transcending the limits of thought, to move one step 
further. The key to such an historic antithesis as 
that of creation and emanation is apt to be found 
in a conflict of various interests, each in itself 
legitimate. In this case the interests represented 
by the word creation, are first, its personal and 
rational implications, and second, its anti-dualistic 
slant. As against the Greek conception of matter 
as a principle co-eternal with Spirit and wrought 
upon by it, it affirms that the explanation of the 
world is to be found in God, not in God plus matter. 
That is also the force of the old phrase, “God made 
the world out of nothing.” But this, taken without 


20 See Matthews, Studies in Christian Philosophy, pp. 215-25, 





THE METHOD OF CREATION 87 


qualification, is creation by virtue of the magic 
wand, not by work done and energy put forth. And 
emanation theories have been concerned to protest 
against the apparent emptiness of this conception by 
grounding the world not in zero but in God. Their 
failure to satisfy fully lies in their suppression of 
reason and purpose in the Source, and of purpose 
and freedom in the outcome. But it is not necessary 
to lose sight of these, for we may find in the personal 
nature and active will of God the adequate Ground 
and Source of our world. That is to say, our world 
may be understood as the outcome and expression, 
not of God working by magic upon nothing, but of the 
forthgoing, creative energy of God. It is Divine 
energy in action; it is the personal work of God 
creative. No doubt this is only to merge all our 
lesser mysteries into one great mystery, for we can 
not tell ‘Show being is made.” But it may be also 
that such a funding of our questions is the proper 
goal of philosophy. For when we have found the 
final solution of all our problems it is unlikely that 
we shall be able to explain 7t. And it may be that 
the ultimate explanation of the world is to be found 
in the native power of Divine Spirit, simple, original, 
incapable of being analyzed, capable only of being 
experienced. ‘‘The Father,’ said Jesus, “hath 
life in himself’’—and out of the fullness of His life. 
He giveth life. The last answer to the last question 
we can ask may be found in the essential Fatherhood 
of God. Creative Fatherhood may be a real Ultima 
Thule beyond which no ship sails. 


88 SHARING IN CREATION 
IV 


CREATION A CO-OPERATIVE ENTERPRISE 


If this be so, then the proper business of thought 
is to turn back to the created world and try to 
understand, as well as may be, the nature of the 
hife given. Of that life one obvious feature found 
in experience is its relative independence and power 
of initiative. No doubt, this is ‘“‘the main miracle” 
of creation, 


that thou art thou, 
With power on thine own self and on the world. 


But it is a miracle that begins, if biologists of the 
vitalistic school are to be believed, on levels lower 
than the human. “As we ascend the scale of being 
there is a growing amount of experimental in- 
determinism. . . . . When we begin experimenting 
with a starfish we can not tell what it will do in the 
various situations in which we place it, but when 
we have experimented for a long time we can tell 
what the starfish we have worked with will do under 
certain circumstances. . . . . But when we are rash 
enough to make a prediction in regard to the be- 
havior of a fresh starfish, we are likely to be very 
far wrong. . . . . The impression we get from 
the study of even starfishes, seems to us to hold 
for the whole realm of Animate Nature and for 
ourselves in it. We find neither systems of absolute 
determinism nor ‘miscellanies of miracles’ but 
systems in which determinism and freedom are 
both illustrated, sometimes more of the one and 
sometimes more of the other... . . but our con- 


THE METHOD OF CREATION 89 


ception of the typical organism is not complete 
unless we recognize its possibilities of initiative and ex- 
periment, of trial and error, of choice and control.’’#4 

We see then in the animal organism a center 
of life that possesses some measure of initiative, 
undertakes experiments, accumulates experience, 
lives and learns by living. And animate evolution 
may be understood as the result of the ceaseless 
interaction that goes on between organisms and 
their environment. The environment provides the 
field of experiment for life, but life in some degree 
selects among the various opportunities offered it. 
Land animals began to be when a marine animal 
crawled ashore and made himself at home there. 
And such power of adventurous experiment means 
that the organism, dependent though it be upon the 
system in which it lives, has achieved a certain 
amount of creative independence. In part it is 
made; in part it is self-made. “I make things 
make themselves,’”’ says Nature in the well-known 
passage in Kingsley’s Water Babies. Precisely. 
Organic evolution is the animal world working out 
its own types in given conditions out of given 
potentialities. Even on the animal level God seems 
to stay His hand a little and a little withdraw 
Himself—enough to give the creature room not 
only to exist, but to live. 

There has never been a time, then, when the 
course of life was not in part the result of spon- 
taneity, adventure, enterprise. But on the human 
level these features are tremendously intensified. 
Animal life we know only from the outside, but 


21 Thomson, System, etc., pp. 220-1. 


90 SHARING IN CREATION 


human life we know from within. And we know 
ourselves as beings with power to choose among 
possible courses of action. It follows that human 
growth becomes increasingly self-directed growth. 
Evolution becomes history. In the world of man 
God restrains yet more definitely His almighty 
power and gives the creature yet wider space for 
individual action. And this He does because He 
seeks a world that shall be the home of personalities, 
capable of moral choices and of personal fellowship 
with Himself. An end of this kind can not be 
reached by successive fiats: a person, so far as we 
can see, must, In some sense, make himself. For 
the form and quality of a specific personality is the 
outcome of a personal history and an individual 
experience—it is slowly born in the course of in- 
numerably separate acts of choice, out of much effort 
and toil. It is all that I have inherited and known 
and done that makes me what I am. Ancestral 
history and American institutions helped to make 
Theodore Roosevelt, but Roosevelt in turn helped 
to make history, America—and Roosevelt. And 
so the creation of man is essentially the “creation 
of creators,” the bringing to birth of centers of life 
and consciousness whose destinies, in the last resort, 
lie not in their stars but in themselves; beings who 
will choose among the possibilities of experience and 
determine, from hour to hour, how much of it and 
what part of it they shall take up into their own 
lives and weave into the permanent pattern of their 
souls. Human life is the work of God—and man. 
And all that man may hope to become must be won 
by man—with God. 





THE METHOD OF CREATION 91 


It is not to be forgotten, of course, that man’s 
independence is a circumscribed and limited one. 
We live within limits strictly drawn by our own 
natures, by the system in which we dwell, and so 
by the God who works within the system. Our life 
can only be described as one of dependent-inde- 
pendence. Dependent upon God we are for our 
world, for the opportunity of life, for the stimuli 
that would persuade us towards higher and better 
living. Our life is rooted and grounded in God— 
‘in him we live and move and have our being.” 
But on the other hand it is the fact that we possess 
thoughts and feelings and make decisions that are 
indefeasibly our own that makes us persons. Our 
moral experiences especially, our sense of moral 
achievement or of moral failure, insist that our acts 
shall be, in the last analysis, our acts and not those 
of another. Our dependence and our partial inde- 
pendence are both matters of experience for us, and 
if our thinking is to be faithful to experience we must 
take account of both. “You know what I mean,” 
says Browning in Chrisimas Eve, 

God’s all, man’s nought, 

But also God, whose power brought 

Man into being, stands away, 

As it were a hand’sbreadth off, to give 

Room for the newly made to live. 
“It is of the essence of theism,’’ writes Prof. Sorley, 
‘that God has by the process that we inadequately 
term Creation given an existence to finite beings 
such that they may be said to stand in relation to 
him—as his creatures, as doing his will, as alienated 


92 SHARING IN CREATION 


from him or reconciled to him, or in other ways... . 
The status is not one of complete independence, for 
it is itself a manifestation of the divine activity .. . 
The fullness of his being makes possible the existence 
of finite beings who are other than himself, and with 
whom he can enter into relation.’ 

Indeed, the conferring of such limited inde- 
pendence would seem to be the essence of what we 
mean by creation. ~Otherwise we have only exten- 
sion and diversification, existence but not life, God 
but not man. ‘Unless creators are created,” says 
Professor Howison, ‘‘nothing is really created.” 
And it is at this point that the discontinuity of man 
with nature becomes most apparent. For human 
life is less an extension of nature than a construction 
of man—it is man-made rather than nature-made— 
it is a manufactured article. “I definitely break,” 
says Prof. Marett, ‘with the opinion that human 
evolution is throughout a purely natural process... . 
I am prepared to say that human life is pre-emi- 
nently....a work of art; the distinguishing mark of 
man consisting precisely in the fact that he alone of 
the animals is capable of art.” The life of man is 
indeed essentially what human enterprise makes it, 
rather than the mere projection and continuation 
into the spiritual world of forces at work below it. 
Old things are there, indeed—hunger and love, 
instincts and tendencies social and anti-social, but 
they have suffered a sea-change. They have become 
the material of life rather than the very form of life 
itself; they have been passed over into the hands of 


22 Moral Values and the Idea of God, p. 486. 
33 Anthropology, p. 155. 


- -- ~~ eee aie 


THE METHOD OF CREATION. 93 


man with the question as to what uses he shall make 
of them still an open question. For in man, life has 
become deliberative, reflective, ethical; and what 
was the almost inevitable shape of life on lower 
levels has become but raw material to be worked 
over and worked info such shapes of Beauty and 
Goodness as we can compass—or into shapes of 
Terror and Despair. The critical issues for our 
planet have shifted from the visible to the invisible 
world—henceforth it is within the world of spirit 
that the central battle lies. 

But this means that creation takes on more and 
more the character of a co-operative enterprise. 
“We are’—or may be—“‘fellow-workers with God.”’ 
Henceforth God will create increasingly through 
enlisting the co-operation of men. It is to be ex- 
pected, moreover, that new creative tools will be 
found in the hand of God. Mallet and chisel will 
do the sculptor’s work with marble for the material, 
and beauty may be the outcome. But mallet and 
chisel were no longer pertinent when Pygmalion’s 
statue came alive. So wind and rain and ice-chisel 
may serve to create the beauty of misty mountain 
range or softly rounded hill, but something more 
is needed when personal life has appeared in the 
world. Mechanical device thenceforward drops into 
the background and personal influences come into 
the foreground. Revelation may increasingly re- 
place legislation, free co-operation may be sought 
instead of mechanical conformity. Creation may 
become creation by the presentation of ideals, 
and the main factors of evolution may become spirit- 
ual. And in truth it is by such means as these that 


94 SHARING IN CREATION 


the Divine Worker chiefly moves towards His spir- 
itual ends. He works by the personal influence that 
is inspiration; He works in the working of ideals of 
goodness and truth that lure us into their free serv- 
ice.’ He works in the complex of ethical and 
spiritual influences that dwell in organized religion. 
He sends His servants the prophets. And last of all 
He sends his Son. In Christ, creation becomes crea- 
tion by personal Leadership, and in that leadership 
God works ever more widely throughout the world. 

Jesus, indeed, formally describes his mission 
as a mission of salvation and creation. ‘““The Son 
of Man came to seek and to save that which is lost.” 
“T came that they may have life and have it abun- 
dantly.” This is the one work with two aspects that 
his Father has given him to do—for rescue from sin 
is a stage preliminary towards a complete creation, 
the removal of hindrances that the man may go free 
to live and grow. That work is the great common 
task of God and man. We think of it as a divine 
gift when we sing 


Finish now thy new creation. 


And St. Paul formulates it as a human task when 
he pleads with the Ephesian Christians, “that ye 
put away oo... theold. man =.), \. 2) anda 
ye be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on 
the new man which is after God being created in 
righteousness and holiness of truth.” The old evolu- 
tionary problem of how man came to be, over which 
we have puzzled so long has, indeed, in a sense 
become academic. It is a problem which, whether 
solved in our theory or no. has assuredly been 


THE METHOD OF CREATION 95 


solved in God’s practice. Man is here. And the 
really significant question has become, not ‘‘How 
did the world produce man?” but ‘‘What will man 
make of the world?” It is a problem not of origin 
but of destiny. And this prablem, like the other, 
must be solved finally, if solved at all, not in the 
region of philosophy or theology, but of history. It 
must be solved by the creative action of man in 
league with God. 

One final question remains. The assignment 
of any measure of initiative to man has sometimes 
been conceived as if it involved a contraction of 
the authority of God. Does not human freedom, it 
is asked, constitute a limitation of God’s omniscience 
and omnipotence? Does not man’s “power on his 
own life’ qualify God’s complete control? In a 
sense, no doubt, these suggestions are true. Every 
creative enterprise involves limitation in the sense 
that certain means are required to reach a certain 
goal. If the free and ethical God will create a race 
of spiritual kinsmen, he may not at the same time 
make them machines responding mechanically to 
every inflection of his will. Nor can he assure it 
that his will shall be done save by enlisting the co- 
operation of their wills. Thus to will a specific 
result involves a self-limitation to the means appro- 
priate to reach it. ‘Though therefore in a sense 
created nature may be said to limit God’s absolute- 
ness, as in the case of finite free will, it is with no 
essential limitations, but only a contingent one. In 
other words, it is self-limitation consequent on God’s 
will to create.’’?4 


% Illingworth, The Doctrine of the Trinity, p. 190. 


96 SHARING IN CREATION 


But surely there is a more essential point than 
this. The word limitation is really relevant only 
when we think of God as naked Power and proceed 
to match against each other such sheer abstractions 
as “omnipotence” and ‘‘freedom.” Its relevance 
disappears as soon as we substitute for these empty 
concepts, the concrete terms “‘God” and ‘‘man,” or 
“Father” and ‘“‘son.” Then we see that the right 
word is not limitation but fulfillment. It is not an 
experience of limitation when the statesman steps 
out of his motor car, which has been obedient to 
his every touch upon the levers, and enters his 
office where the delicate and complicated problems 
of statecraft await him. And that the physicist 
should leave his laboratory to deal with a problem 
in the life of his son is not the contraction but the 
release of power. So the character of human life, as 
personal rather than mechanical, does not involve 
the contraction but rather the extension of the power 
of God. If it means that there is a region in which 
mechanical forces do not apply, it also means that 
there is now a region where spiritual powers may 
come into play. It means that God in relation with 
the world may be not only Artificer, but also Teacher, 
Guide, Father, and Friend; may begin to create 
goodness as well as crystals, beauty as well as ether- 
waves, truth as well as data. The release of man in 
the world is also the release of God in ways that this 
world had not hitherto seen. 

Of what it means to God to create we catch 
some glimpses. The craftsman when his work lies 
finished before him, the orator aware of the fitly 
spoken word, the poet presiding over the wedding 


THE METHOD OF CREATION 97 


of sound to sense, the shipwright when the vessel 
takes the waves—these all know something of the 
meaning of the words, ‘“‘God looked upon the world 
and saw that it was good.” But there is still a 
deeper satisfaction available, which should be 
lacking to no man who wishes to share to the fullest 
extent in God’s creative enterprise. It is the satis- 
faction of having a direct share in the creation of 
the ethical, the spiritual, the religious—a share in 
the making of man, 


CHAPTER III 
THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 


The conclusion that creation is a co-operative 
enterprise, reached in the last chapter, raises 
definitely the question of Purpose—whether there 
is any purpose in our world, whether, assuming its 
presence, we can tell what is the nature of the pur- 
pose. Purposes there certainly are. Our own 
activity takes in large part the form of the pursuit 
of ends. Each day of our experience is full of efforts, 
more or less successful, to reach a hundred small 
goals. But the presence of many such minor ob- 
jectives in a human life is not of itself enough to 
make us call it purposeful. Rather, if this be all, 
we are apt to speak of it as “‘drifting”’ or ‘“‘objectless.”’ 
The term ‘‘purposeful” we reserve for a life that 
is controlled and dominated by a single ideal. As 
many streams flow into one river, so all a man’s 
lesser activities may be brought into union with 
the main direction of his life and made to serve it. 
And it is in this last sense that the question is raised 
about our world. There are purposes enough in the 
world, good and bad, but is there any purpose of 
the world? Is there any central tendency in it that 
seems to be the salient tendency? Is there any task 
at which we can work and be sure that we are work- 
‘ing at the central task? If creation is, indeed, a co- 

98 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION oy 


operative enterprise, what is the essential creation 
in which our co-operation 1s demanded? 

The question whether there is any central 
purpose in the world is not necessarily and always 
answered in the affirmative. It is quite possible 
for a man to become so bewildered and bemused 
by life that it seems to him at last altogether empty 
of meaning. So it appeared to the poet, James 
Thomson. The tragic conviction of the fundamental 
futility of things has never been given clearer or 
more forcible expression than in these lines from 
“The City of Dreadful Night:” 


The world rolls round forever like a mill; 
It grinds out life and death and good and ill, 
It has no purpose, heart, or mind, or will. 


Man might know one thing, were his sight less dim; 
That it whirls not to suit his petty whim, 
That it is quite indifferent to him. 


Nay, does it treat him harshly, as he saith? 
It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath, 
Then grinds him back into eternal death. 


Upon the question of purpose depend indeed all 
possible further questions and answers. For if 
the world means nothing, then all thought about 
it sinks to the level of an attempt foredoomed to 
failure to extract meanings from the meaningless 
and to reason about the irrational. 


I 
Tue PurPposeFruL WoRLD 


The word purpose names that kind of action 
or movement which looks towards a future result. 
It is forward-looking action. It is action that 


100 SHARING IN CREATION 


can not be accounted for in terms of its antecedents 
alone. For its full description reference must be 
made to its consequents. We are accustomed to 
say that the present, in some degree, determines 
the future. But in purposeful action it is paradoxi- 
cally true that the future determines the present; 
that which is to be tomorrow decides what shall 
be done today. This comes about through the 
presence in the mind of an idea or ideal which is 
being gradually realized by creative labor. And a 
measure of spiritual cohesion is conferred upon the 
necessary process or series of events by the presence 
of the single ideal at work in each of the successive 
stages. The separate actions or events are ‘‘strung 
on the thread” of a thought. So in any great 
factory one may see a hundred different processes, 
co-ordinated to the production of a single result. 
A purposeful system, large or small, would thus 
be a system which received its final and fullest 
meaning when interpreted as the more or less 
complete expression of an idea. 

Now the Christian view is that our world can 
best be understood as such a purposeful system. 
The evidence for that view is the total history of 
the world, and to discuss it or even to suggest it 
in any detailed fashion would involve a review of 
all the past with this interest in mind.! Here it 
is possible only to picture rather than formulate 
some of the reasons that lend support to such an 
interpretation. We can do this best perhaps by 
attempting to visualize the impression that the 
movement of the world-process might make upon a 


1 An approach to such a detailed review is to be found in the writings of L. T. 
Hobhouse. See especially his Development and Purpose. 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 101 


detached spectator. We may imagine an observer, 
a wise angel, perhaps, who is not in possession of 
the secret, watching from some point of vantage, 
the unfolding history of the world and asking 
himself whether it has any definite meaning. 
The origin of matter lies beyond our scientific 
knowledge and we can not picture its beginnings. 
But we know that the first great scene beheld of 
our imaginary observer would be the formation of 
the physical world. And the natural processes 
engaged in that work would seem to him to be 
moving in orderly fashion and in definite directions. 
The atoms behave, not as a chaotic mob, but 
as a disciplined army of workmen engaged in 
a constructive task. They marshal themselves into 
different groupings, they organize into formations 
ever more and more specialized, they coalesce into 
rocks, they break up into soils, they thin into mist, 
they condense into oceans. ‘They have the effect 
of being harnessed to an enterprise. Something 
is taking shape in all their weaving and interweaving, 
and presently—as the geologist counts time—it is 
clear that this ‘“‘something” is the Earth, with its 
atmosphere and its plains, its mountains, its rivers, 
and its seas. And the Observer might well ask— 
indeed, could hardly avoid asking—What, now, does 
this portend? Or does it portend anything at all? 
The questions, if they were asked, would not 
go without an answer. For, presently, at a fit 
moment, when all things are ready, there appears 
a bit of protoplasm, rising and falling in the warm 
waves by the shores of some great sea. It is a 
thing small and frail; it lies among the elemental 


102 SHARING IN CREATION 


forces of the ancient world like an infant in a den 
of monsters. But it proves to have within it amazing 
powers of self-preservation, self-propagation, and 
self-diversification, and, above all, a vital thrust, 
an élan vital, which drives it forward and upward, 
so that out of it in the process of time, there comes 
into being the world of living things. And with the 
coming of this world, sea and earth and air are 
revealed as so many homes for life—life that flashes 
in the crest of the breaking wave, that slides down 
long declivities in the air, that slips in and out 
among the shadows of the forest. And now for 
long ages, the physical world having become rela- 
tively stable, the attention of the Observer will 
be fixed upon the growth of Life. The world of 
organisms is become the center of change and the 
natural process is engaged in working out the 
many possible variants of the single theme of Life. 

As age succeeds age that world of life rises to 
higher and yet higher levels—it becomes ever more 
alive. It becomes more sensitive, its speed of re- 
action is increased, it makes experiments and some- 
how registers and remembers the results of its ex- 
periments. More and more, too, the life is focussed 
in the brain, and with the growth of the brain, the 
development of the body drops into the background, 
and the locus of creative changes shifts to the region 
of the psychical. Again it must begin to be plain 
to the Observer that something new is on the point 
of being born. That new thing comes; it is Mind. 
And with its coming two great series of changes 
begin to occur. First, Life itself undergoes qual- 
itative enlargement—it becomes life that is mental, 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 103 


ethical, social, religious. New doors are flung open 
to it on every side and new worlds lie exposed to its 
exploration. And, secondly, along with the ex- 
pansion of life all past results acquire a new value 
and meaning. For with the coming of Mind the 
story which Nature has written finds a reader, and 
everything that Nature has produced may now be 
laid hold upon by Intelligence and set to serve new 
ends. Indeed, the very physical earth is at once 
transformed into a new thing once the light of spirit 
is lit and begins to shine in the world. ‘Then for the 
first time the sun sets in beauty; then for the first 
time is uncovered the majesty of the mountains. So 


. . . Man once descried 
Imprints his presence on all lifeless things, 


and in man the past is at once renewed and fulfilled. 

The course of evolution so pictured may be said 
to possess two clearly marked features. First, it 
is clear that it is a progressive process. From the 
standpoint of a rational observer, it moves steadily 
upward—from less organization to greater, from 
simpler to more complex, from lifeless to living, from 
body to brain, from instinct to reason that inter- 
prets what has gone before. There is in the process 
the suggestion of a disciplined attack and advance, 
a steady upward thrust sustained through long ages. 
“Beyond doubt the most impressive fact about 
animate nature is the ascent of life. It has gone on, 
reaching from step to step in a manner for which we 
have no word but progress. Its historic movement, 
as Lotze finely said, is like that of an onward-ad- 
vancing melody. It is a fact that nobler and finer 


104 SHARING IN CREATION 


forms have appeared on the world’s stage as one 
geological period has succeeded another .... The 
life of the creature has escaped more and more from 
the thraldom of the environment .... There 
has been an increasing amplitude of life... . There 
has been, it appears to us, an increasing liberation 
of the Psyche.’”? 

Second, the progress so achieved seems to be 
the outcome of correlation. That is to say, each stage 
prepares for and seems to work for those that come 
after. And at each great advance the achievements 
of the past are taken up and embodied in the next 
step and so made the basis of further advance. In- 
organic chemical processes make ready the materials 
which life shall use, and life, when it comes, finds 
the materials ready to its hand. Prof. Bosanquet 
remarks upon the fact that ‘‘the processes of inor- 
ganic matter are physically continuous with and 
essential to the processes of life, and if the latter are 
teleological, the former can hardly be less so... . 
Much of the work done by inorganic forces, e. g. 
_ the change of rock into soil, are obvious conditions 
of the adaptation of the earth to life. ... The 
continuity of the earth’s geological structure with 
social and historical teleology is obvious.’? So 
may be illustrated the fact that Nature seems to 
co-ordinate processes to ends foreseen, but yet 
unrealized; she lays foundations and then builds the 
house, ‘‘she prepares and achieves, she prophesies 
and fulfills.” 

No doubt the end is not yet; the creative proc- 


2J. A. Thomson, The Wonder of Life, p. 3 
3 Individuality and Value, p. 146 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 105 


ess is still going on. But surely we have already 
seen enough of its course to frame certain rational 
judgments upon it. And if we are interested in 
discovering its meaning as well as describing it 
scientifically, one natural judgment is that the 
world-movement is a purposeful movement. Any 
broad survey of the natural history of our world 
conveys to us directly and forcefully the impression 
of a vast creative energy which works tirelessly and 
intelligently over great spaces of time towards 
distant goals and “fills the ages with its successive 
products.”” The Book of Nature, as we seek not 
just to count its letters and describe their physical 
history, but to read off its message, is not found to 
be a record of aimless events. It is found to be a 
true book, a story with a distinct plot. It has a 
sustained development, it carries through a thread 
of meaning towards a logical conclusion, it has its 
unexpected denouements that are nevertheless 
seen, once they have happened, to have been implicit 
in the story from the first. It has, indeed, the 
continuity of a work of art, in which the separate 
details assist in the rendering of a central theme 
and co-operate in the creation of a single impression. 
Nature, in St. Augustine’s phrase, looks like ‘an 
ascending poem of Divine ideas.” 

“Without a measure of direction,’’ writes the 
geologist, Prof. N. S. Shaler, “the successions of 
being necessary to elaborate intelligence to the 
human station could not have been attained. We 
have to believe that something analogous to, if not 
more nearly allied with, the sense of purpose in our 
’ own minds has guided this work .... To those 


106. SHARING IN CREATION 


who have devoted themselves to natural inquiry, 
at the same time keeping their minds open to the 
larger impressions which that field affords, there 
generally comes a conviction as to the essential 
rationality of the operations. They have to con- 
sider facts which can not be otherwise explained, 
except on the supposition that a mighty Kinsman of 
man is at work behind it all. Again and again 
the naturalist feels*that this or that feature of the 
order exactly satisfies him, just as he feels that the 
turn of a phrase or the shape of a thought in an 
author is after his own mind. In fact, to the in- 
quirer this recognition of himself, of his own intel- 
lectual quality in the events which he is considering, 
gives the sense of the highest pleasure which his 
occupation affords.’’4 

Such a view of the world is, of course, a human 
judgment upon scientific facts. It is an interpre- 
tation of the facts of science, not one of the facts 
themselves. Purpose is not to be detected and 
isolated as one particular cause in the chain of 
scientific causes. And for that reason it is not 
demonstrable on the scientific level. But we should 
have the same difficulty in detecting purpose by 
strictly scientific methods in any series of events, 
however certain of its presence we might be. A 
rigidly scientific account, as physical science seems 
nowadays to understand itself, of Leander swimming 
the Hellespont, would take the form of describing 
his successive muscular pulls and pushes and meas- 
uring his expenditure of energy. ‘There could be no 





4N.S. Shaler, The Individual, pp. 310-314. See also Thomson s System, etc. 
pp. 642-3. 


_ THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 107 


mention of purpose in the description, and Hero 
could only be regarded as a pleasant surprise turning 
up unaccountably at the end. And yet for Leander 
—and for any ordinarily intelligent observer—the 
whole episode was suffused with purpose from 
end to end. The fact of the matter is that purpose 
is a spiritual quality attending events and is therefore 
always and everywhere invisible on the “‘natural”’ 
level. It is true here, as St. Paul said, that the 
natural man—the man who is on the lookout only 
for physical quantities and connections—discerneth 
not the things of the spirit. 

The conclusion, then, is that the history of our 
world, if one studies it with an eye for meanings, 
vividly reveals an immanent continuous purpose. 
The world-system is a system of “confederate 
forces working towards an end.” “The infinite 
energy shows the characteristics of thought in its 
working.’”’> That is the interpretation which seems 
to do most justice to the total facts; it enables us 
to get an intellectual grasp on the whole of things; 
it illuminates the history of the world and it under- 
girds the actual business of living. And the pur- 
poseful quality thus revealed does not seem to be 
the expression of an occasional Agency intervening 
only now and then in a system otherwise purpose- 
less. Purpose is not just a fifth wheel that functions 
at occasional evolutionary turning-points, not a 
feature that appears only when physical explanation 
is lacking. So far as Christian philosophy is con- 
cerned, the chain of natural causes may be continuous 
and unbroken from end to end. For purpose, if 


5 Simpson, Spiritual Interpretation of Nature, p. 244. 


108 SHARING IN CREATION 


it be present, must be discoverable working in and 
through the natural causes themselves. ‘The process 
of the universe . . . . must be taken as a whole 
in which the spirit of the wholeiseverywhere present.” 
And the conception which finally emerges is that 
of a purposeful system—a system itself purposeful 
—which is so correlated, so organized, so creatively 
determined and inwardly directed that it moves, 
however haltingly and slowly, towards rational ends. 
We may say, indeed, in the words of Prof. Hobhouse, 
that while such a view of the world does not remove 
at once all difficulties, yet it may be submitted, 
“not in the least as a matter of faith, but as a 
sound working hypothesis, that the evolutionary 
process can be best understood as the effect of a 
purpose slowly working itself out under limiting 
conditions which it brings successively under con- 
trol,’’6 


II 
THE PURPOSE OF THE WORLD 


But what is the purpose of the world, the goal 
that our system is seeking? No doubt even to 
ask such a question may seem, at first glance, a 
piece of intellectual presumption. How can we 
possibly have the materials for an answer to a 
question so great as that? Is it not better that we 
should simply do our duty from day to day and 
leave the final outcome to God? But then the 
question arises, what is our fundamental duty? 
And the answer to that question depends upon 
the answer to the former one. For it is our duty 


6 Hobhouse, Development and Purpose, Pref., p. xxvi. 





_ THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 109 


to co-operate with the purpose of God in the world, 
and in order to co-operate successfully we must 
know what His purpose is. Nor does it seem 
altogether unreasonable to expect that our world 
should uncover to us its central meaning. Data, 
real if partial, are before us, and it would seem 
that reflection should yield an answer. 

It has been sometimes maintained that the 


answer is happiness, the ideal goal of life, Heaven, . 


being pictured as a condition of static beatitude. 
And it is no doubt true that happiness is an ob- 
jective of the world process and one element in the 
full life. But it is an objective that has this peculiar 
feature. If it be sought directly it eludes us. It 
is a truism that the pursuit of pleasure for its own 
sake is self-defeating. It ends not in happiness but 
in satiety. But not even the higher pursuits, 
followed merely for the sake of the delight that 
they bring, fulfill their promise; art pursued with 
a finger on one’s own emotional pulse turns thin 
and decadent, and knowledge, gathered with only 
the miser’s satisfaction in accumulation, breeds but 
a peevish, self-regarding culture. Nor is “the 
greatest happiness of the greatest number” a more 
satisfactory goal. It is really impossible to confer 
happiness by itself in forms that shall possess any 
permanence. It is proverbial that children will 
fall a-squabbling on Christmas morning with their 
laps full of unimaginable riches. ‘Will the whole 
Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confec- 
tioners of modern Europe,”’ asked Carlyle, ‘‘under- 
take in joint stock company to make one shoe-black 


ma 


110 SHARING IN CREATION 


happy? They can not accomplish it above an 
hour or two.’”? 

We need, then, a term with a wider and richer 
meaning than happiness to name an adequate 
purpose for the world. And such a term is suggested 
by the world-process itself. It is the word Life. 
As we look back over the past the creative increase 
of life seems to be the central feature of the history 
of the earth, the thread of continuity that runs 
throughout the whole and gives it a measure of 
cohesion. We see the world from the first shaping 
itself to be a breeding place and training school for 
life. We see life itself begin to be and thencefor- 
ward the amplification of life seems to be the main 
interest of nature. Life interacts ever more swiftly 
and sensitively with its surroundings, it explores in 
every direction the possibilities of living, it em- 
bodies itself in the dangerous beauty of the tiger, 
it towers in the lark that sings at heaven’s gate. 
And when man arrives, the development proceeds 
upon the same theme, albeit deeper chords are 
sounded and richer variations play into the move- 
ment—social, ethical, rational, religious—life per- 
sonal and spiritual. Still the increase of life is the 
motif of the music of our world. Nor can we, I 
take it, by any effort of thought or imagination 
conceive any further or worthier end than this 
which the world itself suggests. Many roads may 
yet remain for life to travel and the ships of man 
may sail on stranger seas than the Spanish Main. 
But upon the basis of the knowledge that we possess, 


7 Sartor Resartus, ch. ix. 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 111 


it would seem that whatever secrets the future may 
have in its keeping are secrets of life.® 

Life then, taken in no limited biological sense, 
but with the full content that history has actually 
given it, seems to be the completest description of 
the purpose of the world as that purpose has been 
defined by the history of the world itself. And 
that history culminates, if our previous discussions 
are valid, in the personal existence of man. But the 
successful advance of life seems to depend upon two 
main conditions. There must be sustained effort, 
for if life withers in an environment too hard, it 
softens in an environment too soft. As the muscles 
develop only by being put under strain, so it is 
with the powers of the soul. Life has grown by 
struggle, partly between its different forms and 
partly against a difficult environment, and the 
struggle has been an essential element in its growth. 
But along with the struggle and in part as its out- 
come there must develop, for the completest success 
of life, an increasing measure of harmony. ‘The 
organism that fails to adapt itself in some degree 
to its surroundings is eliminated; conflicting ten- 
dencies within the individual may cancel each 
other and produce inertia; the man divided against 
himself loses his momentum; perpetual war arrests 
the progress of a civilization and ultimately brings 
about its downfall. Conversely, allied tendencies 
lend each other mutual support so that the strength 
of each is multiplied; confederation is a source of 


8‘*The Universe is not a place of pleasure nor even a place compounded of 
probation and justice; it is from the highest point ofview ... . aplace of soul 
making. Our best experience carries us without hesitation thus far’’ (Bosanquet 
Value and Destiny of the Individual, p. 60.). 


112 SHARING IN CREATION 


power, and, on the higher levels, the increase of 
social co-operation is almost the measure of the 
increase of life. It was the motto of the Three 
Musketeers, ‘‘Each for all and all for each,” that 
gave them their singular efficiency. Harmonious 
effort or effort towards harmony would seem to be 
a primary condition of the growth of life. 

But there are complicating factors. An har- 
monious effort may be directed towards low ends, 
may seem destined to reach them, and yet may 
prove in the long run self-destructive. A confedera- 
tion for offensive purposes may so threaten the 
security of the world that it succeeds only in array- 
ing the common will of mankind against it and 
brings about its own dissolution. Or a state may 
be so highly organized for purposes of production 
that it seriously weakens the individuality and 
initiative of its citizens. They may tend to lose, 
in practice, if not in law, their status as responsible 
individuals and to become only units in a vast 
system with scarcely more freedom than the cogs 
in a machine. There is harmonious effort, perhaps, 
but the harmony is mechanical rather than vital, 
and while there may be a temporary increase of 
efficiency, there is a decrease of life. And in the 
long run decrease of life means decrease of efficiency 
also. It would seem therefore that we must amend 
our definition and say that human life can reach 
its highest levels only by harmonious effort directed 
towards the highest ends, which are not exclusively 
private or national but are capable of enlisting the 
support of all mankind. Life can win the highest 
only by seeking the highest; if it would discover 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 113 


its fullest possibilities it must be through the service 
of the best ideal of itself that it can frame. 

But this is familiar ground for the religious 
man. In so describing the purpose of the world we 
have only set forth the substance of the New Testa- 
ment conception of the Kingdom of God. For the 
Kingdom of God is not ‘‘as the Kingdoms of this 
world,’ organized in part for ends lower than the 
highest and narrower than the fulfillment of the 
life of mankind. It is organized life, indeed, but 
the principle of its organization is free co-operation, 
not mechanical obedience. It is the organization 
of a Divine-human Family in which the interests of 
the individual life may never rightly be lost sight of. 
For the fundamental relation of its members to its 
Head is that of sons to Father—‘‘and all ye are 
brethren.’’ Nor is it organized primarily for delight 
but for effort—‘‘Blessed are ye when men shall 
reproach you and persecute you and say all manner of 
evil against you falsely for my sake.’”’ It is organized 
for service under the leadership of God. Its im- 
mediate goal is the highest possible goal of eliciting, 
with God, the fullest possibilities of life in this 
world; of making this world, as completely as may 
be, into a world of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, 
a world of God. And that is a task for which all 
men may volunteer, an ideal to the service of which 
all men may be ealled. For it is the Kingdom not 
of God only but also of man, and in its gradual 
realization the creative life of God and man, so far 
as this world is concerned, is fulfilled. The central 
purpose of the world is the increase of spiritual life 
through social enterprise in alliance with God. And 


114 SHARING IN CREATION 


in the progress of that enterprise lies the continuing 
fulfillment of the long travail of the earth, the ful- 
fillment of man and the fulfillment of God.°® 

It does not follow, of course, that our system 
has no other ends than this. Other ends there are, 
some more or less clearly visible, some, it may be, 
not yet visible at all. The contention here is not 
that nothing save man has value for God, but only 
that the increase of personal life is the central 
value discernible in our world. The necessary 
qualification is well put by Prof. Sorley. “I have 
already spoken,’’ he says, “‘of nature as the medium 
for the production and perfection of goodness in 
finite minds. This interpretation we may give— 
indeed, we must give—if we accept the moral and 
the natural orders as belonging together. But it 
does not follow that it will explain everything in 
nature. It would be too proud an assumption to 
assert that the whole of nature, of which we know 
only the barest fragment, has no other purpose 
than this one which concerns ourselves. Omniscience 
is a foible against which the modest philosopher 
should be on his guard. What other purposes than 
this there may be in the wealth of worlds that 
people space, or even in the small world known to 
ourselves, we can not tell; and, except as a matter of 


9‘*Why does the world as we experience it exist, and what is its significance 
and the meaning of life? . . . . Theism has ananswer. The world exists because 
it was created by the love of God. Its purpose is to educate and fashion finite 
spirits, through free effort into the status of children of God; to bring them to a 
condition of intellectual and moral development such that they may enjoy that 
complete communion with God which is the consummation of their being, and may 
form that community which, by the harmony of the selves with one another and 
with their Creator, constitutes the Kingdom of God’ (W. R. Matthews, Studies 
\n Christian Philosophy, pp. 107-8). 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 115 


speculative interest, it does not concern us to know. 
On such questions the only safe attitude is one of 
provisional agnosticism. But these doubtful issues 
do not interfere with our interpretation of our own 
consciousness and the world which environs it.’ 


III 
THe WORLD-PURPOSE AS REVEALED IN JESUS 


The position that we have now reached enables 
us to see more clearly and more fully the place of 
Jesus in the purpose of God. For with the move- 
ment towards the increase of personal life he 
definitely linked up himself and his work. Life was 
one of his great words. His own mission in the 
world is the giving of life; He is come that men 
may have life and may have it more abundantly. 
Life is the human goal; ‘‘He that believeth hath 
eternal life.’”’ And the life that he lived on the 
earth, the death that he died, and the resurrection 
that he won are just the exhibition under the forms 
of time of the permanent characteristics and quality 
of the life of God. As God incarnate he lived before 
us the Godlike life in our world. And that life is 
also the truly human life, just because it is Godlike, 
because man is the child of God and his true nature 
is to conform to the nature of his great Kinsman. 
He is to be perfect as his Father in heaven is perfect. 
And therefore to make effective contact with Christ 
is to understand that the true and abiding life, 
Divine and human, is the Christlike life. 


10 Sorley, Moral Values, 459-60. + 


116 SHARING IN CREATION 


Jesus thus embodies for his disciples the clear 
and concrete revelation at once of God’s creative 
thought and of man’s ideal. In his life the ends 
that God is seeking and that we must learn to seek 
if we would work with God are spelled out for us 
in great dramatic capitals—on the Mount of 
Temptation, on the Mount of the Sermon, on Olivet, 
on Calvary. ‘The life indeed,” as he called it, 
has been lived among us and we have seen its glory. 
It is the glory of unlimited service with whatever 
is needed of sacrifice. We know now what evolution 
is for and how to co-operate with it. | 

This is the substantial meaning of all that 
language in the New Testament which describes 
Jesus as the Word of God, the Head of Creation, 
the first-born of every creature. In Christ God has 
spoken to men his central creative thought in a 
Word; and the Word was a life lived in the world; 
and the Life is a Light by which men may guide 
their stumbling feet into the Way of ‘‘the Life 
indeed.” He is the secret which has been hid for 
ages and generations in the womb of time; but now 
it hath been manifested to his disciples. He is the 
second Adam in whom the potentialities of the first 
Adam came to light. And therefore he is the Leader; 
the Head of the Body, the Church, Lord and Master 
of those who are definitely trying to live the Christ- 
like life. These phrases from the New Testament 
are all just so many different ways of saying that 
in the personality and life of Christ the Divine 
purpose and the human ideal are so brought into 
focus for us that we can see them clearly and so 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION Ley 


see clearly the meaning of life. And for St. John 
and St. Paul, who are chiefly responsible for this 
group of ideas, Jesus is not the contradiction of the 
natural but its very climax and fulfillment, inter- 
preter of all the past and prophet of all the future, 
the Light, not the standing puzzle, of the world. 
They saw him, indeed, not at all as a mysterious 
person in an otherwise perfectly unmysterious world, 
but rather as the explanation of the mystery, the 
answer to the riddle of the earth. Jesus had taught 
them what the world is for. 

But such a discovery of the purpose of the 
world focussed in Jesus Christ has dynamic as 
well as illuminative value. It means immediately 
three things for the practical business of living. 
First, it gives to life the sense of direction. If 
the Christian idea of the origin of creation tells us 
whence we have come, the idea of the purpose at 
work in it tells us whither we are bound. Not to 
know these things is to be a mere wanderer in the 
world without any definite sense of location or any 
final objective. This is the condition that the 
New Testament refers to when it speaks of “the 
lost.” To be lost, as Jesus defines and illustrates 
it, is to be astray—as a sheep in the mountains, 
as a coin that has disappeared from its place. It 
is to have lost one’s way or place in the world. 
It is to have lost the sense of the road by which one 
has come and of the direction in which one should 


11 “J would describe Christianity in its largest sense to be the fulfillment of 
God in the world through the fulfillment of the world in God. This assumes that 
the world is completed in man in whom also God is completed in the world. And 
so God, the world, and man are all at once completed in Jesus Christ—who as he 


was the logos or thought of all in the divine foreknowledge of the past, so alsois , 


he the telos or end of all” (W. P. DuBose, The Gospel in the Gospels, 274). 


118 SHARING IN CREATION 


go. And to be found is just to recover this knowledge. 
The voyageurs of the northern woods tell us that 
no man is lost, whatever difficulties may lie before 
him, if he know where he is and where he is going. 
And to know that one is in God’s world, the servant 
of life, bound for the kingdom of God is to find 
oneself at home in the universe. We can find our- 
selves, indeed, only by finding God, and then 


All places that the eye of Heaven looks on 
Are, to the wise man, ports and happy havens. 


Such a discovery of the meaning and goal of 
life has power also to put into our lives something 
of the spirit of adventurous enterprise. To be 
astray is a very different thing from being an ad- 
venturer, as any man who has ever lost his bearings 
in a wilderness knows well. And it is the sense of 
direction, albeit with innumerable obstacles to be 
overcome and difficult experiences to be undergone 
that gives to the life of the really religious man 
something of the quality of an amazingly interesting 
journey. ‘‘God forgive me,” said Charles Kingsley 
when death faced him, “but I look forward to it 
with an intense and reverent curiosity.” ‘We are 
traveling home to God,”’ is, in one form or another, a 
world-wide marching song. And the authentic voice of 
religion speaks in ‘‘The Seekers” of Masefield’s poem: 

Friends and loves we have none, nor any blessed abode, 

But the hope of the city of God at the other end of the road. 


Not for us are content, and quiet, and peace of mind, 
For we go seeking a city that we shall never find. 


Only the road and the dawn, the sun, the wind and the rain, 
And the watch-fire under the stars, and sleep, and the road 
again. 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 119 


Finally, there is the gift to men of a purpose 
worthy of their unreserved service. One of the 
most serious hindrances to the better sort of life 
is the difficulty of making it seem worth while. In 
early years, no doubt, and perhaps to the end in 
temperaments unreflective or exceptionally vivacious, 
just the daily business of living seems in itself 
sufficiently interesting. But once the instinctive 
vital thrust of youth is spent, many lives begin 
to ask, consciously or unconsciously, the question 
“Cui bono?” and can find no adequate answer. 
We weary of living arduously for petty ends, and 
that is often the reason why a promising life seems 
at a certain point, to lose its momentum and begin 
to settle down into a dull routine, empty of any 
great hope or ambition. The human soul has in 
it, after all, a spark of the divine, and it needs 
great tasks and great ideals to keep the brain 
alert and the nerves strung and life in full spate. 
And these are what Christianity, rightly under- 
stood, would give us. It would vitalize our purposes 
by linking them up with a Purpose vast and com- 
prehensive. It would take up our plannings and 
re-create them as elements in a greater plan. It 
would convert our lives to the service of a cause 
worth the gift of a human life. 

There are always those who think of Chris- 
tianity as but a device for making sure discovery 
of the next world. But indeed, its first effect should 
be to re-discover for us the world in which we are 
living now. Its entrance into a human life should 
mean first of all an awakening to the fact that our 
world has real significance as the scene of the 


120 SHARING IN CREATION 


realization of a purpose worthy of God and man; 
that every little earthly path we walk leads, if we 
will have it so, into the great highways to the City 
of God; that every labor of man may be made a 
contribution to that kingdom of man which is the 
Kingdom of God. ,And he who has not found the 
world in this fashion has not yet fully found Chris- 
tianity. 
IV 


MAN AND NATURE 


The conclusion that nature is a spiritual system 
organized to serve spiritual ends would seem to 
indicate that the spiritual life is to be realized 
through nature. And this has been always, the 
official Christian view. The statements in the 
Apostles and Nicene Creeds, ‘‘I believe in God, 
the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,” 
and, “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, 
maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible 
and invisible’ convey, of course, the positive 
teaching that both the material and the spiritual 
are to be understood as the work of the God whom 
Jesus taught us to know. But, as is so generally 
the case with the doctrinal statements of the early 
Church, the phrases carry a negative as well as a 
positive meaning. ‘They are designed to affirm one 
view and to rule out another. The view against 
which they are directed is the Gnostic theory, 
widespread in the early Christian centuries, that 
“matter and therefore the whole of man’s environ- 
ment in the world, is either inherently evil and 
incapable of serving any good and useful purpose 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 121 


(the work of an evil spirit) or else at once unreal 
and an insidious delusion.’ It followed in the 
Gnostic doctrine that the material world was the 
enemy rather than the friend of the spiritual life. 
Man in the world is like a fly entangled in a spider’s 
web, caught in the meshes of gross matter. And 
it is in specific opposition to this teaching that the 
creeds declare that the entire world is the creation 
of a God who is Father of all. It is for man’s 
blessing, not for his bane. 

This position of the early creeds reflects the 
characteristic teaching of the Bible. In the be- 
ginning, we are told, ‘‘God saw everything that he 
had made and, behold, it was very good.’’3 The 
Old Testament is the religious literature of a people 
agricultural rather than industrial—even the cities 
of Palestine were not large enough to be cut off from 
the country—and it is full of delight in and feeling 
for nature. There are many nature poems among 
the psalms, and in them all the material world is 
described as the work and home of God, 

Who stretched out the heavens like a curtain; 
Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters; 


Who maketh the clouds his chariot; 
Who walketh upon the wings of the wind. 


The prophets, too, characteristically regard this 
world as God’s world, the theater of his constant 
action, in and through which His purposes are being 
carried out. There is no real dualism in the Old 
Testament; the typical attitude throughout is one 
of delight in the lesser beauties of nature, of reverent 


12 Bethune-Baker, Faith of the Apostles Creed, p. 142. — 
13 Gen. i.31. 


122 SHARING IN CREATION 


and trustful awe in the presence of its immensities. 

The attitude of Jesus is in line with the best of 
the Old Testament. He began life in the family of a 
carpenter, but his illustrations and parables of God 
at work are drawn, as a rule, not from the workshop 
but from the fields. All the pageantry of nature 
moves through his teaching—the mystery of the 
mustard seed growing into a great tree, the fig tree 
putting forth her leaves at the touch of spring, the 
lilies bright with God’s own love of beauty, the birds 
of the air, fed of God, the creative rain falling upon 
the just and the unjust. Jesus taught men to 
think of the world as their Father’s home. Nor 
does he ever so much as suggest that sin is born 
directly of the pressure of the material upon the 
spiritual. For him sin originates not in man’s en- 
vironment but in wrong decisions of his own will— 
“there is nothing from without the man that going 
into him can defile him; but the things that proceed 
out of the man are those that defile the man.’’!4 
There is less of nature, it is true, in the rest of the 
New Testament—something is always lost when we 
pass out from the presence of Jesus. St. Paul, 
who wrote most of the remainder, was a man of the 
cities and of the schools, like Phillips Brooks, who 
said that the chimney pots of Boston were dearer 
to him than all the beauties of nature. And it is 
possible that the fervent expectations of the Lord’s 
speedy return played some part in withdrawing 
Christian attention from a world supposed to be 
already in the pangs of dissolution. 


“4 St. Mark vii.16. 





THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 123 


But the view of nature expressed in the Chris- 
tian scriptures and formulated in the early creeds 
has not been fully maintained in the historic religion. 
The classic world of Greece and Rome into which 
Christianity began early to make its way was per- 
meated with dualistic ways of thinking; the natural 
and the spiritual were often thought to be at enmity 
with each other; and something of the current 
outlook passed into the Church. The stream of 
dualistic thought that flows down the centuries 
seems to head mainly in two great springs. One is 
the characteristic Greek notion of matter as an in- 
tractable substance, more or less independent of 
God and alien to spirit. For Plato, matter was a 
limiting element, hindering rather than furthering 
the freedom of mind. The special aim of the Mys- 
tery religions was the release of the divine spark 
in man from its material prison house. And in the 
Neo-Platonism of the first Christian century the 
dualism of matter and spirit became ‘‘a veritable 
opposition.’”’ ‘The other source is to be found in the 
Apocalyptic view of the world of later Judaism. The 
Judaism of the last centuries B.c. saw and in a 
measure taught Christians to see in the world of 
common experience the failure of God’s creative 
enterprise. Nothing could be hoped for from it; 
it was fit for nothing but to be swept away and 
replaced by a strictly supernatural world already 
complete in Heaven and only awaiting manifestation 
on the earth. ‘God,’ it was said, “‘hath made two 
worlds;”’ the first creation having collapsed, it re- 
mains only to replace it by another. 

The outcome of these influences is a religious 


124 SHARING IN CREATION 


type not, indeed, universal in any age but recogniz- 
able in every age. It is a type that deeply distrusts 
the world of nature as the source of influences mainly 
demoralizing. For it the voices of nature are Devil’s 
lures, and it looks but sourly upon young lambkins 
dancing in the spring. Literature and art are 
banned, for they are too palpitant with the joy of life. 
The work of Science is to be regarded with deep 
aversion and distrust; for what is science but an 
attempt to put the natural in the place of the 
spiritual? It follows that religion tends to take on 
the character of a flight from the world to God rather | 
than of an alliance with God in the task of redeeming 
and making the world. ‘This general way of looking 
at things has taken in history many different forms. 
It has bred the ascetic who dreamed that he could 
find God only through escape from an evil world. 
It bred the medieval contempt for marriage and for 
the normal human life, so that the phrase ‘‘a reli- 
gious person” became the synonym for a monk or 
nun. It has bred the modern fanatic who can only 
wait piously, like another Jonah, for the destruction 
of the world though there be those in it too ignorant 
religiously to tell their right hand from their left. 
But whatever the special form it takes, one believes 
only from the lips outward that this world is God’s 
creation, and the path of alienation from nature 
seems the only path of reconciliation with God. 
Unreasonable and unscriptural as it seems, this 
view of things has not been always without excuse 
or even without some justification. There have 
been times and places when the World and the Devil 
came so near being real synonyms that it was difficult 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 125 


for Christians to adopt any other attitude than one 
of detachment and criticism. Even the asceticisms 
of the past may often be viewed with some sympathy 
as unsatisfactory ways of stressing the importance 
of the spiritual as against the utter loss of the spiritual 
in the natural. Indeed, when one speaks of the ad- 
justment of man to his world, the really important 
question is as to the terms on which the adjustment 
is to be effected. Is it to be on terms laid down by’ 
the material or the spiritual, the body or the soul? 
There is a reconciliation to the world which is not a 
reconciliation to God. To make terms with the 
world as it stands or with the world at its lowest, 
that were to fulfill the possibilities of neither nature 
nor spirit. There are returns to nature and returns 
to nature. There was the frivolous and insincere 
return to nature of the French Renaissance courts, 
carrying their paint and powder artificialities into 
eroves no less artificial and playing at being shepherds 
and shepherdesses in little walled-in parks. There 
is the poetic return to nature of Swinburne and his 
successors—more pagan than paganism—paganism 
without its philosophy and its spiritual aspiration. 
There are human returns to the nature of the butter- 
fly; there are human returns to the nature of the 
beast. 

It is plain that any Christian reconciliation 
between the spiritual and the natural must be one 
that conserves the primacy of the spiritual. And 
in this direction science gives us a lead. For science 
has helped us to feel that we are not, as some have 
thought, aliens and strangers in the world, but its 
own children, and Nature is for us no more a treach- 


126 SHARING IN CREATION 


erous and incalculable witch, but our true if somewhat 
severe mother. The spiritual in us is a spiritual 
which nature has nurtured. The truth that man is 
born of nature can be interpreted, as we have seen, 
to mean that man is only natural. But it can also 
and more reasonably be interpreted as meaning that 
Nature at heart is spiritual and moves towards 
spiritual ends. Nor has the extraordinary advance 
of science in its practical aspect been without its 
effect in establishing a closer and friendlier liaison 
between man and nature. In older times, when 
human knowledge and experience was smaller, there 
was ample excuse for seeing in the physical world 
only a chaos of conflicting and incalculable forces; 
then the flight from nature to religion was a flight 
from the irrational and unreliable to the rational 
and secure. ‘There was a time when one key seemed 
as good as another to unlock the secrets of nature 
and we fumbled at her locks with magic formulas 
like drunken men. Pouring water upon the ground 
might very well bring on the rain, amulets prevent 
disease, and whistling up the wind was not an un- 
reasonable procedure in a calm at sea. But we have 
no longer excuse for not knowing that a mathematical 
or chemical formula is a better key than Abra 
Cadabra. The master word to which nature re- 
sponds is ‘“‘Mind.”’ 

‘There is,’ says Prof. Shaler, “a very great 
difference between the sense of personal insignifi- 
cance which the uninformed beholder of Nature 
experiences and that which the devoted student 
enjoys. So long as this maze of action is viewed 
as something foreign to ourselves it can not appear 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 127 


as other than hostile . . . But when we are recon- 
ciled to this realm, when we feel that we are of it 
and it is of us in a common interchange, when we 
know that we have come from it as a child from its 
mother’s body, all is changed; we are no longer as 
the drowning sailor, but as fish of that sea... 
Men may now as Christians look upon existence 
even more cheerfully than the pagan Greeks in 
their best days; with a deeper joy, for they see 
further into the deeps.’’* 

The progress of practical science has been 
moreover, a continuing revelation of the instrumental 
character of nature in relation to spirit. Always, 
indeed, the ministry of matter to spirit has been 
going on, but we become now more clearly conscious 
of it and increasingly able to take advantage of it. 
We live in relation with physical bodies that are 
responsive, if imperfect, organs of spiritual life, 
sensitive to its every impulse, quiescent or passing 
into swift action as its needs demand, registering 
and reflecting its every mood whether of delight or of 
disappointment, of joy or pain, glowing or darkening 
with the moods of spirit. Our very thinking is done 
with brain cells for instruments. And as matter is 
the intimate organ of our life, so is it a medium of 
our education and a field for our creative labor. 
From the days of building blocks and sand piles to 
cathedrals and Winged Victories it is the material 
of our art. And from Aristotle to Kelvin, nay, from 
the earliest man to this day, the thews of the human 
mind grow stronger in the eternal struggle to wring 
from it the knowledge and the skill that mean mas- 
laisse “Phe Individual, pp, 293-4) 331. 


128 SHARING IN CREATION 


tery. A medium of communication between spirit 
and spirit, too, is matter, for we can charge it with 
our own spiritual meanings so that the printed book 
ceases to be wood-pulp and becomes a spiritual 
symbol, the bearer of a drama of human life. The 
very air and ether waves that beat about us are 
tipped with the fires of spirit and go their ways 
laden with the messages of human hearts and minds. 
And ever, on mountain and on moorland, on silent 
lake and in the cool recesses of the trees, in the 
bright day that lifts the heart and in the flaming 
sunset that stirs the spirit like a sudden roll of 
drums, the material world shines with a beauty 
that is purely spiritual, significant in relation with 
the life of spirit, meaningless apart from it. It is 
this unceasing ministry that justifies us in saying 
that nature is in part actually and may be made 
indefinitely the instrument of spirit, the very medium 
in which and through which it shall win its highest 
life.16 

Indeed, it has been recently urged by F. C. 8. 
Schiller that we can not think of matter more usefully 
or more truly than as ‘‘the raw material of the 
cosmos out of which have to be hewn the forms of 
life in which our spirit can take satisfaction.” It 
is fruitless, he thinks, to define it by what it originally 
was or by what it is apart from our own action; 
“Tt 7s what is made of it.’’!7 And this suggests a 





16 “The entire material world is . . . . the common possession or medium 
of life and intercourse for them (organisms), the only truly active beings. Accord- 
ing to the cosmology of theism, in short, the physical world is simply a system of 
means provided for the sake of the realm of ends: it is only to be understood as 
subservient to them, and apart from them is alike meaningless and worthless” 
(Ward, Realm of Ends, p. 252). 


7 Personal Idealism, p. 60. 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 129 


final clue for the interpretation of man’s relation 
with nature. In man, we have seen, the growth of 
the spiritual has become a task to be carried through 
in fellowship with God. And it is, in part at least, 
the task of eliciting our own spiritual possibilities 
through eliciting the spiritual possibilities of nature. 
It is the task of learning so to use the physical that 
it completely serves the spiritual. It is the task of 
developing and exploiting the spiritual possibilities 
of a natural order which is not an enemy and which 
would be a friend—an order, indeed, which has 
brought spirit to birth in order that spirit might 
bring to light and realize its own potencies. 

It must be steadily remembered, however, that 
such an increasing realization of the spiritual is not 
an inevitable or automatic process. We cannot 
depend upon nature to attend toitforus. ‘Nature,’ 
it has been said, ‘‘is a medium only; through it the 
end is to be reached. But minds are not a mere 
medium; it is 72 and by them that values are to 
be realized. They must themselves attain these 
values and not merely receive them.” Just because 
man is mind and directs, in a measure, his own 
action there are always two paths open to him. 
Nature has beauty in her heart, and that beauty 
can be fully realized only in relation with man. 
But we may release that beauty by self-schooling 
in appreciation and by careful tending and develop- 
ment of the world; or we may cancel it by indifference, 
defile it with rubbish heaps, turn forests into wastes, 
and rivers into sewers of industry. We may create 
a desert and call it the progress of civilization. 


18 Sorley, Moral Values, p, 460. 


130 SHARING IN CREATION 


The energies latent in nature may be harnessed to 
the service of human life or they may be unleashed 
for its destruction in poison gas and bomb. Sex 
may be the poignant undertone that is but the 
basis for the overtones of enduring constancies and 
unimaginable loyalties, or it may be, in literature 
and life, but a clash of discords that tell of the 
warfare between man and the beast that lives in 
man. It may be a gateway into gardens where there 
is nothing that is not lovely, and it may be the 
trap-door of a pit in which there is nothing that 
is not common and unclean. So, the problem of 
the material becomes in the last resort the problem 
of the use we shall make of it. It is what man 
does with nature that determines what nature shall 
do for him. 

The history of the world has been described 
as “the gradual process of the spiritualization of 
matter.”’ But that is not quite the whole story. 
There are always the two ways. And history is 
in part the story of the debasing of matter by 
spirit. Sin is a world-wide fact, and sin always 
involves the misuse of things that are given us as 
the raw material of spiritual life. Here, indeed, is 
the basic cause of much religious dualism. It is 
often a revolt against the material as molded into 
ugly and gross forms by the spiritual evil that is 
in men. Deeply aware of the gap between our 
tragic actual and our religious ideal, men tend to 
locate the difficulty in their surroundings rather 
than in their central selves and dream of a short 
cut to the spiritual life. If only the hampering 
material circumstances of life can be cut away— 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 131 


the normal human life forsaken, the body eliminated 
by an ascetic discipline—will not the spirit rise and 
soar? They have not perceived that the root of the 
disease lies not in the body but in the spirit, that 
sin is not in nature but in man. And with dismay 
they find that neither in mountain retreat nor in 
desert solitude have they escaped envy, jealousy, 
greed, and fear. ‘There you go, my heart’s abhor- 
rence,’ says the monk in Browning’s Spanish 
Cloister, 


Water your damned flower-pots, do; 
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence, 
God’s blood!—would not mine kill you? 


A Christianity that fully understands itself is 
a religion neither of escape nor of acquiescence. It 
is a religion of rescue and of realization. And its 
proper attitude is not that of mere defense against 
contamination at the hands of an evil environment, 
but of positive attack upon the problem of redeeming 
the world from its misuses and of fulfilling its 
possibilities. If it is one of the first assurances of 
religion that beyond this world lie other realms of 
God, it is the first and immediate business of religion 
to make this world as completely God’s world as 
may be. The religion of Christ looks for the real 
solution of the problem of the relation of the natural 
and the spiritual not in the region of thought but 
in the region of creative action. Nature 2s actually 
used and misused; is the means and machinery for 
spiritual achievement and for spiritual degeneration. 
And religious philosophy can only point out the 
facts and indicate the ideal possibilities. The 
problem can be really solved only in the region of 


132 SHARING IN CREATION 


behavior, as individual men and women do actually 
in the practical business of living learn how to make 
the natural world the medium of the spiritual life. 

Indeed, matter and spirit, as we have been 
thinking of them, are but abstract generalizations— 
we know in experience only particular persons and 
things. With these we are related in endless ways, 
and out of these relations there rise afresh each day 
the opportunities for the life of the spirit. And it 
is in these concrete situations that we work out the 
answer to the wider question and determine what, 
in point of fact, the relations of Matter and Spirit 
shall be. ‘To the practical working out of the 
problem in terms of the supremacy of the spirit 
Christianity commits us, and so far as that program 
is carried through, the speculative problem is slowly 
eaten away by specific solutions. And in so far as 
God and man succeed in making together the 
Kingdom of Heaven, there will eventually be no 
problem left to solve. 

It is to be feared, however, that something of 
the ancient dualism lingers on into our own time. 
Young people are often found regarding Christianity 
with some suspicion as demanding a semi-ascetic 
renunciation of normal life in the world. And those 
who are older are sometimes found skillfully con- 
veying the suggestion that piety consists chiefly in 
refraining from things which they themselves no 
longer wish to do. The attempt to meet these 
demands may sometimes be observed to breed in 
the young a strained and unnatural virtue which 
lasts, perhaps, a week and then breaks down before 
the hopeless vision of the joyless years. The writer 


So 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 133 


well remembers a much-thumbed copy of ‘‘Ivanhoe’”’ 
buried deep in the garden in a moment of religious 
zeal. Having chosen definitely the higher life, such 
light reading was no longer for him. The continued 
existence of such misconceptions is due either to 
inadequate presentations of Christianity or to the 
fact that Christian formulas are often heard without 
clear understanding of their meaning. ‘There is 
much talk of self-discipline and self-sacrifice and 
self-renunciation among religious people. And these, 
taken as naked abstractions, are, indeed, meaningless 
or even repellent. We feel instinctively that self- 
sacrifice is a means, not an end in itself, and few 
persons are more irritating than those who insist 
on being persistently sacrificial when there is no 
need of it. It is only as these qualities are given 
specific application, it is only as they are clearly 
related to ends worth the self-sacrifice or self-denial, 
that they become significant or lovely. It is written 
of Jesus that “for the joy that was set before him, 
he endured the cross, despising the shame.” It was 
the thing he was seeking to do that made the process 
worth while; it was the purpose of the salvation and 
service of life that gave meaning to the life laid 
down. 

“A disciple is not above his teacher nor a 
servant above his lord.’”’ Deliverance from negative 
and limited conceptions of Christianity is to be 
found in the insight that the disciple of Jesus is the 
servant of life. And the service of life means the 
release of the soul, not its constriction. Jesus 
himself was no ascetic—to the scandalization of 
some of his contemporaries. ‘The Son of Man 


134 SHARING IN CREATION 


came eating and drinking and they said, Behold a 
gluttonous man and a wine-bibber.’”’ And the 
religion that he founded has for its objective not 
the destruction of the natural life of man but its 
fulfillment ‘in the Spirit.” Christianity knows 
self-control, it knows self-discipline as a means of 
increasing personal efficiency, it knows self-sacrifice 
for worthy ends, it knows self-denial for the sake 
of a greater good. But of asceticism proper, as a 
means of escape from an evil world, a fully-awakened 
Christianity knows nothing. Rather it would make 
the world itself the means to a spiritual end. And 
the truly spiritual man does not find it necessary 
to voyage afar in search of pursuits and realms 
remote from the material. Rather he seeks per- 
petually to discover the spiritual meanings of all 
life, habitually judges and values it by spiritual 
standards, habitually conducts his own life in the 
interests of spirit. 

Thus we are brought back again to the con- 
ception of our total world as a system which finds 
its unity in the purpose that dominates it. It is 
best understood as a systematic process in which 
God works towards spiritual ends through agencies 
material and spiritual. It is a process in which 
men realize these ends through discovery of the 
purpose of God and alliance with it. The carrying 
through of the process to its consummation were 
the fulfillment alike of nature, of man, and of God. 
And the material world is to be regarded neither 
as perverse nor as diabolic but rather as an element 
in a system of which the first and last word is 
Spirit. But it is, in a sense, an element indifferent 


THE PURPOSE OF CREATION 135 


and indeterminate except as it is wrought upon by 
mind and so endowed with ethical and spiritual 
values. It can be the organ of our most splendid 
sacrifices; it can be the organ of our deepest shames. 
It sets the stage alike for the last stand and for the 
panic-stricken rout. It is the broken arm of the 
lady-in-waiting who sought to bar the Queen’s door 
against the mob; it is the garden to which Judas 
led a detachment of soldiers seeking the Son of 
Man. But alike in its uses and its abuses it is the 
servant of spirit—there is no purpose too high for 
it to serve and none too base. And the task of 
Christianity, as a creative religion, so far as the 
material world is concerned, is that of completing 
the consecration of the natural to the service of 
the highest ends of spirit, so that religion becomes 
not a flight to God from the world but rather a 
movement through nature to God. Towards that 
complete consecration Jesus pointed the way when 
he. took the two familiar elements of bread and 
wine and made them the perpetual symbols of his 
spiritual presence with the Church. And every 
Christian Communion repeats his teaching that 
there is nothing so common that it may not be 
used in the service and made luminous with the 
presence of God. 


CHAPTER IV 
THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 


Once the process of the world has been found 
to be the working out of a central purpose, imme- 
diately a further question presents itself. What 
are the means by which that purpose is being 
achieved? What are the methods by which God 
leads the world towards its goal? Nor has the 
question only an impersonal interest for us, such 
as one may feel who watches another at his work. 
For if something of human co-operation is required 
in creation, then God’s work is also our work. 
And some accurate knowledge of the methods of 
God is essential for intelligent co-operation—we 
need to know something of what we may expect 
from God and of what he expects of us. To the 
Christian, therefore, intent upon rendering the 
utmost service that is in him, it becomes a matter 
of the greatest practical importance to learn as 
much as possible of, so to say, the technique of 
God. And such knowledge, gathered and organized, 
constitutes a doctrine of God’s providence. 


i 
Tue IDEA OF PROVIDENCE 


A Christian idea of providence may be said to 
rest upon three presuppositions. First of all, a 
136 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 137 


providential God must be an immanent God whose 
power is directly at work throughout creation. He 
must be as St. Paul said, “‘through all and in all.’ 
But an immanent energy is not necessarily a provi- 
dential energy. Steam may be said to be immanent 
in an engine—it is the quickening force of the 
machine—but it is, in itself, a purposeless energy. 
It works without foresight or plan and it exercises 
no rational control. It will keep the engine going so 
long as its own energy is not exhausted and that is 
all. And so, for providence, we need to add to the 
idea of immanence the idea of wise superintendence, 
the idea of transcendence. God must be something 
more than just the driving force of the world, some- 
thing more than just the energy that keeps it going. 
He must be “over all.” But still we have not got 
quite the materials for a doctrine that is fully 
Christian. For to have full confidence in providence 
we need to be assured that God cares for the world 
and works in it to some good end. And that assur- 
ance we receive in the Christian belief that God is 
‘Father of all.’”’ The source of providence is, then, 
the immanent yet transcendent Father who is God.! 

For the purposes of these lectures these pre- 
suppositions must be assumed without discussion. 
But a few words may be said by way of brief defini- 
tion. We are very apt to attempt to picture or 
visualize the relation of God to the world in terms 
of space rather than think it in terms of spirit. And 
when this is done immanence is apt to become a 
synonym for physical diffusion and transcendence 
a synonym for remoteness. In the one case God 

i Cf, Eph, iv.6. 





138 SHARING IN CREATION 


tends to become for us just a name for the sum-total 
of energies at work in the world—and that is Pan- 
theism; in the other He tends to become an absentee 
God, too distant and detached to be a serious factor 
in the everyday life of man—and that is Deism. 
And religion becomes either a mystical awe in the 
presence of Something which we can not describe 
and to which we can give no name, or else only a 
certain yearning towards a Power too austerely 
remote to be reached by prayer, too far away to be 
a friend. It is but 


The desire of the moth for the star, 
Of the night for the morrow; 

The devotion to something afar 
From the sphere of our sorrow. 

A possible theistic and Christian view may be 
briefly stated as follows. We begin with immanence, 
abandoning completely all effort to conceive a God 
apart from our world. Whatever God may be “in 
Himself”? or whatever may be His wider relations, 
the God whom we know is God in relation with us 
and our world. God is, indeed, just the name of 
a Power revealed in our total experience, physical, 
historical, spiritual. And the God so revealed, is 
known as a being present and active in nature and 
in history. He is discovered, too, not as an inde- 
finable Something but as Creative Personality. 
The Presence which we find lighting up the world 
is a personal presence. God is not the nameless 
One—His names are Reason, Will, Purpose, Right- 
eousness, Love. And personality means selfhood; it 
means a kind of life that exists for itself and is not 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 139 


to be identified with anything else. It may create, 
but it does not become the thing it creates; it is 
present in its works but not lost in or identical with 
them; it is more than what it makes and does. 

But these statements are the definition both of 
immanence and of transcendence in spiritual terms. 
For the immanence is not the immanence of diffusion, 
of a finer substance permeating the substance of the 
world. It is the immanence of conscious spirit, 
aware of its purposes, putting forth its energy 
towards rational ends. And the transcendence is 
not that of distance but of supremacy. It is the 
transcendence of purpose, which looks beyond any 
given phase of its activity. ‘As possessing in Him- 
self the purpose or an idea of the purpose of the 
whole time-process, God must be regarded as trans- 
cending the process itself.”? It is the transcendence 
of will, which acts freely and expresses not some 
external necessity but the inner nature of the per- 
sonality; of the creator, ever more and other than 
that which He creates. It is the supremacy of the 
causal and originative over that which is produced 
and derived. We have really stated both truths when 
we have said that God, whom we discover through 
His immanence in the world, is discovered as personal 
creator and, therefore, can not be just the sum of 
the world of things and men. ‘“Transcendence,”’ 
says Prof. William Adams Brown, “‘is only another 
name for the divine personality. It expresses the 
fact that while God is in the world He is not ex- 
hausted by the world; that He is not only the 
source of life and power, but of standard and ideal. 


2 Sorley, Moral Values, p. 449. 


140 SHARING IN CREATION 


It regards the world not only as the place of His 
activity but as the sphere of His purpose.’’? 

The history of theology is full of attempts at 
rather nice discriminations in regard to the methods 
and scope of God’s care of the world. Thus a some- 
what rigid distinction has often been set up between 
providences that are general and those that are 
special. General providence is defined as God’s 
administration of the whole in the interests of the 
whole; “special” are those rescues and reinforce- 
ments intended for a particular individual or group. 
A further distinction is sometimes made between 
providence and grace. In this case the realm of 
providence is restricted to God’s dealings with the 
world other than those that are specifically Christian, 
while Jesus with all that flows from him belongs to 
the realm of grace. It is doubtful whether these dis- 
criminations serve any other purpose than to create 
confusion in our minds. For since the world is made 
up of individuals, providence that is general must 
be also special—if by special providence is meant 
that which reaches the individual need. Until it 
has done that it has done nothing at all. And any 
“special” assistance to the individual at once enters 
into the stream of the world’s history, reacts upon 
the whole and becomes general. If it is meant only 
that a valid providence must keep before it the well- 
being of the individual and the race—of man and 
men—that is true enough. But to establish two 
contrasted types of divine action is to attempt an an- 
alysis into which it is hard to put any clear meaning. 

Still less is it possible to draw any clear 


3 Christian Theology, p. 200. 





THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 141 


distinction between the realms of providence and 
grace. For on any adequately Christian view 
Jesus Christ is the very climax of the providence 
of God. Jesus is not an appendix to, but the very 
focal point of, the constant saving and creative 
work of God, and all that God does in and through 
Jesus is the fulfillment rather than the supersession 
of His normal method in the world. It seems 
better, therefore, to take the conception in a very 
large and general way as including God’s entire 
method and means of moving towards the fulfillment 
of his purpose. We have found reason for defining 
that central purpose in terms of the increase of 
personal, ethical life. In its widest reach, therefore, 
providence will include the means by which God 
brings man into being, the methods by which he 
is trained and developed, all rescue-work or salvation 
that redeems him from failure, all provision for his 
future. To take the idea in this fashion is, no 
doubt, to condemn oneself to a certain vagueness as 
to detail. But where the scale is really a large one, 
such vagueness may be nearer the truth than a 
precision secured at the cost of comprehensiveness., 
The scale on which God works 2s vast, and we can 
not, with any approach to truth, define the idea in 
terms less general than these. The military text- 
books tell us of the tactics of the separate arms, 
infantry or cavalry; of combined tactics which 
unite the various arms in action; of the strategy which 
controls the entire campaign. Providence is nothing 
less than the grand strategy and tactics of God 
in relation with the world. 

But on a view as spacious as this, it is obvious 


142 SHARING IN CREATION 


that we have to go to what is a fragment only for 
the material for an interpretation of the whole. 
The road that man has followed in the world soon 
disappears, as we seek to trace it back, into 
the swamps and quagmires of pre-history. We 
cast back, from our last footing of solid historic 
ground, grappling-hooks of archaeology and an- 
thropology and drag forward into view a few poor 
skeletons—Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal—and learn 
a little of what manner of men we were. But of 
the greater part of our racial history we know 
almost nothing, and are reduced to speculative 
reconstructions more or less dubious. And, on the 
Christian view, there lie before the individual and 
the race illimitable years of history in the future. 
It is a fact that we have to understand as best we 
can a process admittedly incomplete; to catch 
fleeting glimpses of a plan that is only in the process 
of being realized; to frame judgments on methods 
the full justification of which may le far in the 
future. And surely it is of the essence of good 
sense to take this into account. We can hardly 
ask, with reason, a full justification of the ways 
of God with man. As well might a child in the 
primary grade ask a full elucidation of the educa- 
tional system upon which he is entering. As well 
might a soldier demand of his general a lucid exposi- 
tion of the plan of campaign as the pre-condition 
of his co-operation. 

And yet if the world-process be one, informed 
with one purpose, even the fragment open to our 
observation should give us real knowledge of the 
ways of God. The lines along which He moves are 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 143 


long lines of continuity; they emerge out of the 
past, they run through the present, they will reappear 
in the future. And if, in that small portion of 
the whole which is all that we can study they 
seem to be reasonable and hopeful lines, that is 
all we need or can demand as a basis for faith in 
Providence. Then we can apply with a good hope 
and on a larger scale the suggestion of Rabbi Ben 
Ezra: 

Grow old along with me! 

The best is yet to be, 

The last of life, for which the first was made; 
Our times are in His hand 


Who saith, “‘A whole I planned; 
Youth shows but half; trust God; see all, nor be afraid.” 


There is another important prerequisite for 
attaining any useful knowledge in this direction. 
The method used must be empirical; the knowledge 
must be based upon our actual human experience. 
That is to say, it must be born of observation of 
how God does really work, not of our human passion 
for suggesting how He ought to work. We must 
study God’s world as learners, not as dogmatists 
who desire only to have our hastily formed ideas 
verified. There must be in our attitude something 
of humility, something of eagerness to correct 
partial or one-sided views that we may have formed, 
some awareness that our ideas of a process so 
vast and so complex will probably need repeated 
expansion. But given such an attitude, we have 
open to us sources of real knowledge. The world 
of nature is one great field of God’s action; there 
His methods are visibly in operation, and all that 


144 SHARING IN CREATION 


can be learned of nature is knowledge of God. The 
first Law of Motion is a law of divine providence 
as truly as any that we can name. The world of 
human history is another field, and though here the 
laws are less easy to formulate, yet all knowledge 
that we gain of the normal process and method 
of human life is knowledge gained of God. The 
human family is a phase of providence—“And 
God said, It is not good that the man should be 
alone; I will make him a help meet for him.”’ Indeed, 
it is from these sources in nature and history that 
the teaching of the Bible is drawn. The teaching 
about providence contained therein reflects the 
insight of its authors into the actual ways of God 
in the world. ‘‘He maketh his sun to rise on the 
evil and on the good.” ‘“The wages of sin is death.” 
These and other like sayings record principles and 
processes that are objectively true in the world of 
things and men. They are true in the Bible because 
they are true in experience. 

Judged by the test of objective experience there 
are two widespread views of providence that seem 
unsatisfactory. The first has in it the fallacy of 
over-emphasis upon a truth. Men have felt some- 
times that if we are to regard the world as the sphere 
of God’s purposes it is necessary to understand every 
event in it as the direct expression of the will of God. 
This position is usually taken, no doubt, unreflec- 
tively, in obedience to a religious impulse to put the 
world completely in God’s hands. But if its conse- 
quences be thought out even a little way, it is found 
to contradict some of the surest convictions of 
religion. It would force us to bring every sin of 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 145 


man—every murder and every adultery—within 
the scope of God’s will. It would empty life of all 
moral meaning, for the very core of the moral life 
is the conviction that the will of God may be done 
or refused. It would turn every man into an auto- 
maton, moving stiffly in obedience to divine decrees, 
and every prayer for help in the struggle of life into a 
thing as mechanical as the voice that issues from a 
phonograph. For really to pray for aid means that 
we need aid, and real need of aid can only arise out 
of a situation indeterminate. From this standpoint 
human living loses all significance, and the logical 
outcome is the view of life held by the Persian poet: 

We are none other than a moving row 

Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go 


Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held 
In Midnight, by the Master of the Show. 


And life itself is a drama 


Which for the Pastime of Eternity 
He doth Himself contrive, enact, behold. 


But this is fatalism, not Christian Theism.‘ 
Providence differs from Fate precisely in that it 
makes room for the free co-operation—or rebellion— 
of men. In a fatalistic system, not only the end 
in view but every step on the way to its achievement 
is definitely prescribed from the beginning, as the 
last phase of a mathematical demonstration is con- 


4“That doctrine (of preordination) robs the divine experience itself of all 
seriousness, and assigns to the Highest a role that thousands of earnest and thought- 
ful men have regarded as altogether unworthy. Even if we rejected the eternal 
reprobation that is part of it and supposed all to end happily, the whole would 
still be devoid of any moral value; the actions would still be the acting of puppets, 
not the deeds of free persons. And as to the dramaturge himself, we might credit 
him with a singular hobby, but we could not possibly regard him as the God of the 
living, the God who is Love’ (Ward, Realm of Ends, p. 480). 


146 SHARING IN CREATION 


tained in the opening phase; in a providential system — 
the end is sought from the beginning, but it is sought 
through creative work that endeavors to overcome 
every obstacle as it arises and bend the raw material 
of circumstance to the service of the central purpose. 
In the one case every detail is unalterably fixed, and 
nothing ever really happens; in the other, new situa- 
tions perpetually arise, that were not implicit in 
what went before and must be dealt with as they 
occur. ‘The above view is, indeed, but a bad way of 
stating the religious conviction that there is no 
event which may not be dealt with in accordance 
with the will of God; that no situation can arise so 
bad that God will not work with us for its redemption 
into goodness. But to say that God will be with us 
in every emergency, is a very different thing from 
saying that every emergency has been pre-arranged 
by God. 

Moreover a process may be purposeful and yet 
not every phase of it be the expression of the purpose. 
When Father John in the thirteenth century crossed 
Asia to the court of Khublai Kahn, his purpose was 
present and active through every stage of his five 
years’ journey, but it was realized at last only through 
a thousand chance meetings and endless accidents 
by flood and field. So the presence of the larger 
purpose of God in our world does not mean the elimi- 
nation of confusion, opposition, accident, even of 
chance, if by chance we mean events that are not 
the result of specific plan. Indeed, life, as we live 
it from day to day, seems really to contain all these 
things; successful living is largely a matter of meeting 
emergencies and utilizing opportunities; and there 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD |. 147 


is no reason to suppose that our ordinary view is 
not the true view. The Book of Common Prayer 
has in it the catholicity of reflecting many-sided 
human experience. And if we read in it of a ‘‘never- 
failing providence that orders all things in heaven 
and earth,’ we read also of ‘‘the changes and chances 
of this mortal life.” 

There is another historic idea of providence that 
is unsatisfactory because, taken by itself, it is in- 
adequate. It leaves most of the workings of provi- 
dence out of account. In the earlier stages of re- 
ligion the work of God in relation with man may be 
understood to consist mainly in special interferences 
in which the ordinary course of things is set aside 
in the interest of individuals. Men may think of 
of God almost exclusively as the Power that meets 
individual emergencies, and his connection with the 
world may be reduced to an emergency connection. 
It is the standpoint of the small boy whose attention 
is captured by the occasional thrilling rush of the fire 
engine through the streets to the exclusion of the 
obscurer workings of the city fathers, the sanitary 
department, and the water supply. Providence so 
understood consists exclusively of a series of dis- 
connected, unrelated events rather than in the carry- 
ing out of a fixed and far-sighted plan. God becomes 
no more than the Great Opportunist, and the world 
the sphere only of a divine occasionalism. No doubt 
at a certain level of religious culture, this is the only 
way in which God’s administration of the world in 
the interest of spiritual life can be conceived or any 
faith in his providence maintained. If God be not 
just the name of the Being who meets my immediate 


148 SHARING IN CREATION 


desire and who stands ready to rescue me from all 
disaster, then what need is there of God in life at all 
and what meaning in religion? When Tom Sawyer, 
understanding prayer only as a device for getting 
what you want, prayed for a new fishing line and 
did not get it, temporary scepticism was the inevi- 
table result. It is only after considerable experience 
that we discover religion to mean a higher thing— 
come to see that our own best interests can be con- 
served only by our learning to know and do the will 
of God and that the power to do this is the great 
thing religion has to give. Then, indeed, religion 
ceases to be self-centred and becomes God-centred, 
we cease to be interested primarily in what we can 
get, and become interested in what we can give to 
the common task of God and man. 

What shall be the largest element in our notion 
of providence depends, indeed, upon our basic view 
of life. The private soldier may short-sightedly 
regard the army as practically identical with the 
service of supply. And he may view his general 
chiefly as the ultimate agency through which he 
gets his clothes, his rations, his furloughs and his 
pay. That is a true enough view as far as it goes, 
but preoccupation with it in time of war breeds the 
confirmed grumbler who never finds anything right 
and spreads demoralization throughout the ranks. 
Or he may, more intelligently, regard the general 
primarily as the strategist of the army, and his 
great interest may lie in co-operating as completely 
as possible with the dimly guessed plan of the 
campaign. So, how we shall think of the providence 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 149 


of God depends on whether we have discovered the 
world as the theater of a great enterprise in which 
we share. And if we do so discover it, then we 
ourselves undergo a certain reorientation. For 
then we see that mankind is on active service. 
And if we think that we have a good cause and a 
good Leader, we are admitted at once into a larger 
circle of interests. Our major concerns cease at 
once to be exclusively personal, and we become 
increasingly interested in co-operating with the 
purposes of God. Certainly the special interests of 
the individual remain important, but we have now 
caught a glimpse of the possibility that these can 
be taken care of only through the success of the 
whole. 

On such a view of the world special rescues by 
way of interposition into the system in which we 
live cease to be the only examples of providence. 
Our world itself tends to become a providential 
world, and the great field of God’s action is seen 
to lie in the immanent direction of the world process. 
But to interpret God’s ways with any success there 
are certain features of the world that must be kept 
steadily in mind. It is first of all, a psycho-physical 
system in which all spiritual results are and must 
be realized in relation with a physical order. The 
spiritual must be achieved in alliance with the 
physical, not in escape from or defiance of it. It 
is, secondly, a system in which freedom is a factor. 
And this means that it is of God’s providence that 
the purpose of the world shall be fulfilled through 
enlisting the creative effort of mankind. And, 


150 SHARING IN CREATION 


third, it is a system which has for its chief goal the 
increase of personal ethical life.* 

Sometimes discussions of providence seem to 
have little enough to do with our actual experience. 
They seem to be dealing with the possibilities of 
a purely imaginary God in relation with a non- 
existent world. And they are apt to degenerate 
into perfectly barren debate as to whether or no 
he can or can not meet this or that hypothetical 
situation without regard to his purpose. But to 
remember the three things stated above is to have 
the problem set within its proper context. It is 
the problem of making sense of our world. And it 
will be possible to make sense of it only ‘‘in the 
light of its own ends.” To attempt to construe 
a university, organized to advance knowledge, as 
an institution designed solely to promote sociability 
were to invite failure. Many of its activities must 
then seem irrelevant or even obnoxious. And to 
attempt to interpret the world as a system designed 
to produce unbroken happiness were to court a 
similar intellectual and spiritual disaster. Rather, 
if the world-purpose be such as we have indicated, 
it will refuse to satisfy finally any desires save the 
best, or to stabilize any happiness save the highest. 
It is always likely, therefore, that we shall all 
have to revise our ideals again and again until they 
come to coincide with the ideals of God. Only as 


5 “Certain views of the world’s purpose seem put out of court on any impartial 
judgment of the facts. The world can not exist simply for the purpose of producing 
happiness or pleasure among sentient beings; else every sufferer might have given 
hints to the creator for the improvement of His handiwork. Nor can we take 
refuge in the old-time conventional theory that pleasure and pain are distributed 
according to the merit or demerit of the persons to whose lot they fall. The wicked 
often flourish and misfortunes befall the righteous” (Sorley, in Elements of Pain and 
Conflict in Human Life, p. 40). 


EO Te 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 151 


we gradually come to view it from God’s standpoint, 
will the course of life become plainer and yet more 
plain. 


IT 


SomE PRINCIPLES OF PROVIDENCE 


1. In the light of the above considerations it 
is possible to formulate certain clear principles of 
providence. Of these one of the most obvious is 
the principle of growth. ‘This principle is written 
deep into the structure of our world and is plainly 
legible therefrom—it is at work alike in great and 
small, in the world as a whole and in the smallest 
organism. Examples are all around us. It is the 
chief method by which the seed fulfills its possi- 
bilities, by which youth comes to manhood, by which 
institutions rise to influence and authority, by 
which civilization itself matures. It is recognized 
by Jesus as a constructive principle of the Kingdom 
of God. ‘So is the Kingdom of God as if a man 
should cast seed upon the earth, and should sleep 
and rise night and day and the seed should spring 
up and grow, he knoweth not how.’’® It is like a 
grain of mustard seed, least of all seeds, that yet 
grows up into a great tree and the birds sing among 
its branches. It is like a bit of leaven, hid in three 
measures of meal, that spreads and spreads until 
the whole is leavened. The conferring upon living 
things of the mysterious possibility of growth is 
quite evidently one of the most important elements 
in God’s creative method. The chief of all the 


6 St. Mk. iv.26-7. 


152 SHARING IN CREATION 


opportunities which our world offers is the oppor- 
tunity of growth. And the deft encouragement 
of growth is one of the great ways of God in the 
world. 

It is the inevitable fate of any great teaching 
that its full meaning and implications are perceived 
only gradually as experience gives us the clue. And 
this is emphatically true of the teaching of the Bible. 
In every age some elements in it are neglected because 
they are not congenial to the mind of that time or 
clearly intelligible to it. And in every age, as the life 
of the world develops, as experience deepens and 
knowledge accumulates, old truths are discovered 
afresh, and familiar sayings blaze with a sudden new 
power of illumination. So the conception of growth 
as a salient feature of God’s administration of the 
world comes to us today with something of the sur- 
prise of a new revelation. But once the revelation is 
received it throws a flood of light upon our entire 
human situation. In the light of it we find ourselves 
members not of a static but of a growing system, 
and that discovery, if it be really worked into the 
texture of our minds, provides us with a fresh stand- 
ard of judgment. So long'as men regarded the world 
as created out of hand in a state of perfection, human 
history could only appear as a gigantic degeneration. 
But God has now put into our hands a new clue to 
His plan and a new method of measurement which 
we may not neglect. In a world which has growth 
for a central principle nothing is a failure that is 
moving in the right direction. And if we find that 
any desirable institution or principle of life or motive 
of conduct, imperfect though it be, is yet over long 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 153 


ages a growing thing, then our faith in providence 
is, so far, justified and deepened. 

Looking out on the world with this standard in 
mind, we may find ourselves able to face, without 
undue pessimism, the actual imperfection of things. 
It is only what we should expect. But the Christian 
man will accept such imperfection not as a fact to 
be acquiesced in but as a problem to be solved under 
the guidance of God. And taking it so, it is likely 
that we will find the center of our interest shifting 
naturally from mere negative criticism to positive 
construction. We may, for example, stop wasting 
time in a thin querulous sort of whining over the 
failures of Christianity, and begin to ask whether 
it has not, however slowly, been succeeding. And, 
perhaps, we begin to look about us for those points 
at which it seems most practicable to accelerate 
growth in order to go to work at them. Then, in- 
deed, we are by way of finding the path into a nor- 
mal, healthy, and stable religious life, a life that can 
confront failure with calmness because it knows that 
no failure need be final, a life that finds in the im- 
perfection of the world not disillusionment but 
opportunity. ‘There are those who view the world 
with a sour eye; they are either acridly critical or 
superciliously cynical. They tell us that they are 
disillusioned. And one wishes to ask. ‘From what 
illusion?” Did they really think that this chaotic 
and tangled life was going to turn out some fine day 
to be the perfect state? And have they never 
heard the story of the Cross? There are others who 
live among the same grim facts and deal, perhaps, 
directly with them—in slum and factory, in office 


154 SHARING IN CREATION 


and drawing-room, in the crowded cities of the Occi- 
dent or among the submerged millions of the Orient— 
and yet are full of hope and courage and enthusiasm. 
These have won some insight into the scale and scope 
of God’s plan and have entered their names as sery- 
ants of the long pull—‘‘till we all attain unto the 
unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of 
God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the 
stature of the fulness of Christ.” 

But it is within our own lives, perhaps, that we 
find most difficult the task of co-operating with this 
providence of God. For personal growth is not an 
inevitable thing but a task calling for the steady 
output of energy. Increase of years does not neces- 
sarily mean increase of wisdom or development of 
character; it may only mean the fixation of crudely 
formed habits of life or thought. And degeneration 
is a fact of experience quite as real as growth—we 
have all known old men who were both sillier and 
more wicked than when they were young. Nor is 
the task of keeping up one’s personal growth alto- 
gether a pleasant one. It involves perpetual read- 
justment of the details at least of a man’s mental 
outlook; it means that one must be perpetually 
openminded towards new truth and towards fresh 
unfoldings of old truths; it involves a certain sus- 
tained readiness to undertake excursions into 
unfamiliar regions when one would much prefer to 
remain comfortably at ease in regions perfectly well 
known. Readjustment is a really difficult thing; 
growing pains are real pains. And if we are not to 
be constantly turning our backs on offered oppor- 
tunities for progress that come to us in the providence 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 155 


of God, it needs to be well understood that growth 
is not only a privilege but a duty. No religious man 
has the right to stop growing, for to do that would 
mean that he was content to remain a less perfect 
instrument for the service of the purpose of God 
than he might be. And though the muscles may 
grow stiff and the arteries harden, there is no reason 
why the soul of a Christian, servant of a God of 
growth, should ever grow old. To feel thoroughly 
grown-up is, indeed, the surest sign of immaturity, 
never vexing wise men after the age of seventeen. 
These grow younger as they grow older and die at 
last in a sort of happy second infancy, declaring, 
with Newton, that they are but children gathering 
pebbles on the shore of Truth’s far-rolling ocean. 
2. A second clear feature of providence is the 
principle of law. ‘‘Do men gather grapes of thorns 
or figs of thistles?’” asked Jesus. ‘‘Whatsoever a 
man soweth,” said St. Paul, ‘‘that shall he also reap.” 
So the New Testament teaches that, alike in the 
physical and spiritual worlds, certain consequences 
follow upon certain antecedents. And this is to 
say that through all the world there runs the method 
of regularity that men call law. Some emphasis, 
too, may be laid upon the word method, for law, 
from the standpoint of Christian thought, is not a 
chain that fetters the hands of God, but a means 
which He uses. Law, indeed, means uniformity, 
but, as Prof. William Adams Brown has said, there 
are two kinds of uniformity.’ There is the unifor- 
mity of mechanism and there is the uniformity of 
rational method. It is uniformity of mechanism 
7 Cf. Modern Theology and the Preaching of the Gospel, p. 117, seq. 





156 SHARING IN CREATION 


when an automobile on a curve with a broken steer- 
ing-gear goes into the ditch; it is uniformity of 
method when a driver turns the wheel now this way 
and now that to follow the sinuosities of the road. 
In this last sense law 1s not the contradiction but the 
expression of purpose and personality. So under- 
stood, law comes alive and becomes a typical mani- 
festation of the activity of God in the world. The 
laws of nature are, indeed, in the theistic view, the 
revelation not of the rigidities of matter but of the 
purposes of God. And the conception of law as the 
expression of definite plan needs to be taken frankly 
and cordially into our theology of providence.® 

For, when one reflects upon it, the value of 
law for life is seen to be immense and continuous. 
The steady consistencies of the physical world are 
the trustworthy basis upon which the drama of 
life enacts itselfi—they provide the stage upon 
which the players play their parts. Life is obviously 
founded upon the regularity and consistency of 
nature. All our dealings with the natural world 
depend directly upon the presence in it of a typical 
method—we can not sow a seed or launch a vessel 
or build a church except as we are able to say with 
some approximation to certainty that ‘“‘this”’ will 
be followed by “‘that.’”’? We must be assured that 
the laws of germination and growth, of displacement, 
of stresses and strains will hold good, and we plant 
and launch and build successfully because they do 
hold good. It would seem also that, for the end 
that the world is seeking, there must be a certain 


*“‘Law is not an external limitation which prevents us from being as free, as 
good, and as happy as we should be if there were no law. The Author of nature 
is One cut servire regnare est’’ (Inge, Faith and tts Psychology, p. 230-1). 





THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 157 


amount of rigorousness in the physical process. 
Most of us have a sufficient experimental acquaint- 
ance with laziness to appreciate the truth of the 
saying that necessity is the mother of invention. 
If man needs to be tempted and persuaded into 
knowledge, he also needs to be scourged into it. 
If early man learned to use fire through his gift for 
experiment, it was also because his teeth were 
chattering; and the sound thereof was as music 
in the ears of the Wise Ones who were watching him. 
If modern civilization is founded upon coal it is also 
founded upon ice. And that a man should be able 
to evade with any frequency the working of physical 
law would mean not his education but his stagnation. 
Our knowledge of nature and our control of her 
have come out of our long conflict with her; “‘out of 
the bitterness of discipline have come the sweets 
of knowledge.’ Natural law, invariable so long as 
the conditions do not vary, is an indispensable 
element in life, and physical science may be regarded 
as the study of the providence of God as expressed 
in the physical world. And if not all scientists 
would hold that science implies God, yet it is open 
to all theologians to hold that God intended science 
and took adequate measures to secure it. 

But the world of physical processes is not 
the only realm of law. It is the mistake of Natural- 
ism to assume that all laws:are of the physico- 
chemical order and to attempt the impossible task 
of reducing all life to that level. But life has its 
own laws, and these, if we are to accept the views 
of many biologists, are of a different sort and must 
bexformulated in a different fashion. They do not 


158 SHARING IN CREATION 


admit of precise mathematical statement, for in 
the world of life the factors of behavior, initiative, 
and, indeed, intelligence begin to come into play. 
‘fA erystal lies where it falls, but a dog picks a soft 
spot.”” Laws relevant to this region have the more 
difficult and complicated task of stating what will 
happen if the organism behaves in a certain way in 
relation with its environment. If the organism 
displays initiative, it has the better chance of life; 
if an organism displays intelligence, it is on the 
high road of progress; if an organism becomes 
parasitic, it slides downhill—in some such condi- 
tional fashion as this, it would seem, the laws 
specially pertinent to life must be expressed. 

The reign of law is not less obvious in the 
world of spirit. There too ‘“‘this’’ is followed by 
“that.”’ And in this region the problem is one of 
formulating the principles that govern the relations 
of personalities with nature, with other persons, 
and with God. But the laws of spirit are at once 
richer in their content and still more difficult to 
formulate with precision just because the factors 
in every situation are more complex and more 
variable. Nor can they be applied in any mechanical 
fashion, for they have to do with the behavior of 
persons. And just as it is the special work of the 
physical scientist to discover and express the laws 
of matter, so it is the work of the prophets and 
seers of mankind, those scientists of the spiritual 
world, to discover and bring to expression tts laws 
in order that men may the more intelligently govern 
their own lives and co-operate the better with the 
providence of God. Moreover, such laws are not 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 159 


to be regarded as arbitrary regulations imposed 
upon spiritual life from the outside, but are rather 
to be conceived as resident in spiritual life and ex- 
pressive of its nature. They are emphatically 
natural laws in the sense that, spirit being what it 
is, they can not be other than what they are. 

Jesus was especially concerned with the spiritual 
world and he formulates many of its principles.® 
There is, for example, the Law of Forgiveness: “If 
ye forgive men their trespasses your heavenly 
Father will also forgive you. But if ye forgive not 
men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly 
Father forgive your trespasses.’"° That law does 
not mean that if man is hard-hearted, God will 
perversely be hard-hearted too. It expresses the 
spiritual fact that so long as a man is unforgiving 
he is not forgivable—that the man who has hate 
in his heart is in no condition to make his peace 
with God. And, conversely, a forgiving spirit with 
all that it implies, is the signal of a spiritual attitude 
that makes friendship with God possible. 

Or again, there is the Law of Spiritual Effort: 
“Eivery-one that asketh, receiveth; and he that 
seeketh, findeth; and to him that knocketh, it shall 
be opened.” This saying expresses the fact that 
religious discovery depends upon spiritual effort. 
One may not expect to win knowledge of God by 
occasionally going to church any more than one 
can hope to acquire an education by casually strolling 
through a library. Spiritual laziness and lack of 
real interest will always mean no religion at all or 
~~ 9Cf, Bp. Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God, p. 135 seq. 


10 St. Matt. vi.14-15. 
11 §t. Matt., vii.8. 


160 SHARING IN CREATION 


contentment with a low form of religion. And this, 
we can see, is inevitable. If God be, indeed, the 
supreme Personality and if a life pitched on His key 
be the highest life, then to find that God.adequately 
and to live that life will put brain and heart under 
strain. It was the evil results of laziness among 
alleged religious people that Jesus had in mind when 
he said that the children of this world were in their 
generation—on their own level—wiser than the chil- 
dren of light. The factory may be full of intelligent 
energy while the church beside it is full of slipshod 
religion. A botanist may go all the way to Africa 
to find a new flower, while his religious neighbor 
may be unwilling to cross the street to win fresh 
news of God. 

The Bible is full of these principles of spiritual 
life, expressed with perfect precision. The spiritual 
world, even as the physical, is a world of law in which 
given antecedents issue in their natural results— 
repentance in forgiveness, righteousness in life, sin 
in death. ‘‘The conception of a self-limited God, a 
God whose very being is law,” says Bp. Gore, 
“has never vanished from the best theology, but it 
has been seriously obscured in much theology,and 
in popular conception... . Thus it is that 
God’s omnipotence has been understood to mean, 
not His universal power in and over all things, 
which works patiently and unerringly in the slow- 
moving process to the far-off event, but rather the 
unfettered despot’s freedom to do anything any- 
how... .. Theactionof Jesus... . is action 
by law and method, action which is in direct con- 
tinuity with the system of natural laws, physical 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 161 


and spiritual. Certainly we can not contemplate 
God in the person of Jesus Christ without appre- 
hending that the divine power works, and must 
work, by law.’’!? 

3. But if by law, also by freedom. For the 
reign of law is experimentally correlated in the 
world of spirit with some measure of personal liberty 
of choice. The liberty of men is not, indeed, absolute; 
it is not to be understood as the complete absence 
of limitation. It is rather the positive power of a 
given person to live creatively in a given environment. 
Its notes are origination, choice through conflict, 
selection under strain among competing motives. 
And it is not a fixed but a growing—or fading— 
quality of personality; it may be strengthened by 
right exercise or lost through misuse. But such as 
it is, it is a central feature of our world, and an 
element in God’s providence. And this for the sake 
of both man and God, because man’s very service 
of God, if it is to have any moral value, must be 
not an extorted service but his own daily act and 
deed. Therefore God will preserve and respect 
human freedom even more jealously than man 
himself. He will only stand at the door and knock; 
if any man open unto him he will enter in and 
make his abode with him, but a forced entrance 
he will not make. And therefore God’s creative 
culture of man will consist, in part, in providing 
various ways which, if chosen, lead to such and 
such results. That is the only method consistent 
with freedom—the method of offered opportunities 
which may be accepted or refused. 

22 Incarnation of the Son of God, pp. 141-2. 


162 SHARING IN CREATION 


Nor must it be forgotten that it is of God’s 
appointment that choices wrongly made shall carry 
with them their own penalties. The really serious 
penalties of an action come out of the action itself; 
they are not externally inflicted. The civil penalties 
of crime are, indeed, more or less arbitrary and 
irrelevant to the offense—a thief may be sent to 
prison or to the whipping-post. And the wide use 
of legal illustrations in theology has trained us too 
much to look for- the punishments of sin to be 
inflicted in a fashion equally external. Then, if 
upon flagrant sin no obvious judgment comes, men 
are ready to say that God is silent and that there 
is no divine moral government in the world. But 
a deeper insight perceives that the worst conse- 
quences of sin come in and through the working out 
in the life of the individual of the results of his 
sinning. The processes of life apply the penalty, 
and they can not be bribed or bought off. Jesus 
said that no formal judgment was necessary to 
penalize men who deliberately turned away from 
him: “This 7s the judgment, that Light is come 
into the world and men loved the darkness rather 
than the light.’”? To follow the low road is to miss 
the high road and the prospects visible therefrom. 
To choose the fellowship of evil is to cut oneself 
off from the fellowship of the good. To follow the 
way of Launcelot is to pass out from the company 
of the Round Table and at last be able to remember 
but dimly the great days when the knights came 
striding in. “Be not deceived,” said St. Paul, 
“God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth 
that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 163 


own flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption, but he 
that soweth unto the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap 
eternal life.’’! 


In the soul of man there is a justice whose 
retributions are instant and entire. He who 
does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He 
who does a mean deed, is by the action itself 
contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby 
puts on purity . .. . Character is always 
known. ‘Thefts never enrich; alms never im- 
poverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. 
The least admixture of a lie—for example, the 
taint of vanity, the least attempt to make a 
good impression, a favorable appearance—will 
instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the 
truth, and all nature and all spirits help you 
with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth 
and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and 
the very roots of the grass underground there 
do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. 4 


But if there is freedom for man in the world, 
surely there is also freedom for God. The necessities 
of the world-process are moral necessities, not 
mechanical ones; its rigorousness is the rigorousness 
of wisdom and goodness which will be satisfied with 
no results save the highest and will press unswerv- 
ingly towards them; its permitted inequalities and 
contradictions are born of patience, working through 
an unfinished process towards distant ends. And 
God is free, as the creator of any system is free— 


313 Gal. vi.7-8 
14 Emerson, Cambridge Address. 





164 SHARING IN CREATION 


free as the father is free in the home that he has 
made. He is free to meet new emergencies as they 
arise, to work redemptively in the world in the 
face of human failure or sin, to meet in the most 
direct and intimate fashion the special needs of 
individuals in it. God is free not as a Power who 
created the world-system long ago and now looks 
on while it grinds out its intended products, but 
as the inner life and agency of the system itself, 
near to all, indifferent to none, working tirelessly 
in the interests of spiritual life. And the presence 
of God within the world implies the presence within 
it of every sort of flexibility that does not contradict 
or cancel or retard the ends for which the world 
exists. His relations with men are not all of one 
sort; He is not only Lawgiver and Judge, but 
Father and Friend; and His dealings with us are as 
various and many-sided as our needs. The prophets 
are His messengers, sent to arouse, persuade, and 
win men into the way of life. The Christian doctrine 
of the Incarnation teaches us to think of God 
Himself as the leader of a rescue mission into the 
troubled field of human history. And the doctrine 
of the Holy Spirit is a doctrine of God in direct 
touch with the soul of every man. The God of 
law is also the God of love; and all that divine 
wisdom and goodness can do in and for human life 
is the daily work of his providence. 

4. Indeed, the control, the guidance, and the 
stimulation of the spirits of men, in every possible 
way, is of the very essence of God’s creative and 
providential action, and the cultivation of that 
communion with Him which we name religion 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 165 


must be regarded as another of its central features. 
The life of man is meant to be a religious life, lived 
in close alliance with God and facing its problems 
in the light that comes from Him. Such a life 
opens up the possibility of prayer. And prayer, the 
baring of the soul to God that God may deal directly 
with the soul, is a method of contact between God 
and man more direct than any of those of which 
we have spoken. It is of the providence of God 
that a man may not only be a student of His ways 
and the subject of His systematic control, but 
may also speak with Him as son to Father, and so 
receive the daily renewal that comes of personal 
comradeship with the Highest, the guidance that 
comes of personal alignment with the Wisest, the 
peace of heart that comes of personal reliance upon 
the Eternal, who is God. The very act and article, 
indeed, of putting oneself in touch with God through 
prayer is, of itself, the supreme reinforcement and 
the supreme illumination. That a child, fearful in 
the dark, should find his father’s hand is the end 
of fear even though the darkness be not destroyed; 
that a child, distressed by some puzzle of his life, 
should see his father’s face is the end of distress, 
even though the puzzle be not instantly solved for 
him; that a child, doubtful between choices high 
and low, should make contact with his father’s 
mind, may be the end of doubt though no visible 
finger be raised to point the way that he should 
go. And if it be said that these results are ‘‘only 
subjective,” with the implication in the background 
that they are ‘‘unreal,’’ the answer is that subjective 
results are real results. They are, indeed, spiritual 


166 SHARING IN CREATION 


results, and the influence of spirit upon spirit is 
the most real and most fruitful thing in the world. 
Through prayer God may work in us both to will 
and to do, and for the man who has learned truly 
to speak with God, all manner of mountains begin 
to be removed and cast into the sea. 

The supreme function of prayer is not, indeed, 
to impose our wills upon the will of God, but to 
add to our wills the strength and wisdom of God’s 
will. Its ideal outcome were that we should never 
fail to discover, in the occasions of life, His will, 
and never fail to find the power to do it. Regarded, 
as only a device for getting from God the things we 
happen to think we want, there could be no power 
more dangerous to ourselves than the power of 
prayer. Often enough, it is likely, we pray for 
release from pain when what we need is courage 
to endure; for a ready-made solution when what we 
need is patience to work out the solution; for an 
unmistakable map of the road when what we need 
is energy to explore. Were prayer what a distin- 
guished man once somewhat coarsely called it, “a 
machine guaranteed by theologians to make God do 
whatever his clients require,’ no wise man would 
dare to pray. At the end of all our prayers we 
need to pray that God will give us what we really 
need. ‘‘King Zeus,” prayed Plato, ‘‘grant us the 
good whether we pray for it or not, but evil keep 
from us, though we pray for it.” 

5. The general goal toward which the world is 
moving, however great, can only be reached through 
individuals; indeed, the culture of individuals in an 
harmonious social life seems to be the goal. The 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 167 


world exists not that laws may be maintained but 
that souls may be made. And if laws are main- 
tained it is in the interest of souls. That were no 
providence at all, therefore, which did not take 
constant account of individuals. ‘‘Are not two 
sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them 
shall fall on the ground without your Father; but 
the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” 
“What man of you, having a hundred sheep, and 
having lost one of them, doth not leave the ninety 
and nine in the wilderness and go after that which 
is lost until he find it.’’5 In these and in many 
similar sayings Jesus pictures God as interested 
primarily in the fate of individuals. He is God, not 
Destiny; He is not content to “let things take their 
course;’ by every possible means and agency He 
labors to make them take the right course. 

This does not necessarily involve, of course, 
the speedy elimination of danger and distress from 
the life of the individual.'® Nor does it mean rescues 
by arbitrary interventions of God—the sheep may 
be brought home on the shepherd’s shoulders, but 
the man must be taught to follow. Nor does it 
mean that each and every experience of life occurs 
by special appointment of God. In a world of 
freedom much of our experience is of our own ap- 
pointment or of the appointment of others. And 
some, perhaps, is what it seems, merely casual. 
It seems to make no difference most of the time 
whether I walk home by this road or that; probably 
it actually does make no difference; none, whether 


6 St. Matt. x.29-30; St. Luke xv.4. 
16 Cf, Ch. V. 





168 SHARING IN CREATION 


the leaf is blown from the tree by yesterday’s wind 
or by today’s. Life would be an almost unbearable 
thing were it all as serious as we sometimes make 
out; the tension would snap the string. And our 
world seems, experimentally, to have in it room for 
the purposeful and the purposeless, for attention and 
for relaxation, for the significant and the indifferent. 

But now and again the quality of life undergoes 
a change, deeper chords begin to sound in it, it 
develops a sudden tension, the casual note disappears. 
Circumstances a moment ago indifferent crystallize 
into meanings, there is a hint of crisis in the air, 
events assume a, spiritual value, they seem to bear a 
message and an appeal, and, ere we know it, an area 
of our common life has grown luminous with the 
presence of God. A man rides towards the City of 
Damascus. Suddenly a Light shines about him 
which is not as the light of common day, and a 
Voice speaks words that shift the whole course 
and direction of his life—that send him, far-journey- 
ing, to Ephesus, to Corinth and to Athens; at the 
last to the headsman’s block at Rome. All his 
days he will remember that momentous hour; all 
his later life will derive and date from that day. 
So at times for each of us, in one fashion or another, 
“suddenly,” or by slow degrees, life grows critical, 
alive with vivid issues, demanding far-reaching 
decisions. Its confused murmur deepens into a 
Voice that we can not ignore, that we must obey or 
disobey, and, then, or looking back from later years, 
we know that God has spoken to us in that hour. 
Only to him for whom it is meant, indeed, does the 
message come, only to him is the meaning plain; 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 169 


to those who stand beside nothing is changed. ‘‘The 
multitude that stood by and heard it said that it had 
thundered; others said, An angel hath spoken unto 
him.’”’ Only the individual can say how and when 
God has met and dealt with his soul.!” 

I can but testify 


God’s care for me—no more, can I— 
It is but for myself I know. 


I can not bid 
The world admit he stooped to heal 
My soul, as if in thunder-peal. 
Where one heard noise, and one saw flame, 
I only knew he named my name. 


And that is miracle. For the essence of miracle 
is not in method but in meaning. It is the supremely 
vivid revelation of the supernatural at work in the 
natural: the open disclosure of God in the world. 


Ill 
JESUS CHRIST AS PROVIDENCE IN ACTION 


It is not the individual life alone that has its 
hours of transition, of crisis, of illumination. The 
larger history of our race also has its specially 
significant tracts, its periods when all human life 
and labor seem to be shaping themselves to finer 
issues and preparing to move forward into new 
“The conviction that they have been the objects of guidance and instruction 
special to themselves, and have been chosen for special uses, may be felt by different 
human beings with different degrees of strength. It is only possible for each 


individual to appreciate the grounds for it in his own case from what he alone 
fully knows” (V. H. Stanton, Elements of Pain and Conflict in Human Life, 134). 


18 Browning’s Christmas Eve, 


170 SHARING IN CREATION 


regions of experience. And in these periods men 
who can read the signs of the times become aware 
that history has ceased to be mere material for the 
annalist and has become the organ of divine action 
and the medium of divine revelation. God seems 
to be dealing more directly and more urgently than 
in common times with the life of man. It was of 
these critical epochs that Lowell wrote: 


Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide 

In the strife ’twixt truth and falsehood, for the good or evil side. 

Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom 

or blight; 

ai vat choice goes by forever ’twixt that darkness and that 

gn. 

Such an epoch was the age of the greater 
prophets of Israel. And some men, “a remnant,”’ 
followed the road of the prophets, while others 
missed the cue of history—and paid the price of 
missing it. Such an epoch was the first half of the 
first century A.D.; and again some recognized the 
new texture of the days while others ‘knew not the 
time of their visitation.” ‘‘And many of them said, 
He hath a demon and is mad. Why hear ye him? 
Others said, These are not the sayings of one pos- 
sessed with a demon. Can a demon open the eyes 
of the blind?’’!9 

Often, we have said, discussions of providence 
seem to have little to do with historical and experi- 
mental reality. In particular, small account is 
sometimes taken of Christianity. But if one would 
construct a doctrine of providence at once empirical 
and religious, a doctrine that expresses what God 
has actually done and is doing in the world, the 

19 St. John x,20-21. 





THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 171 


career of Jesus of Nazareth, sent of God into the 
world on a mission of rescue and revelation, prophet 
and teacher, crucified, risen and ascended, must 
be its culminating feature. To neglect him is to 
make the old mistake of not recognizing God in 
action when we see him in action. And to come 
under the influence of Jesus is to find staring us in 
the face the answers to most of the larger questions 
that we want to ask, to most of the needs that we 
feel. We would have sure and certain guidance 
into the right way of life—and we have but to lift 
our eyes to see One walking before us and saying, 
“He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness 
but shall have the light of life.’ We would have 
clear and vivid knowledge of God. He hideth 
himself, we say, in darkness; but if only He would 
show Himself plainly we would be quick to see and 
belieye—and that One can only say unto us sadly, 
‘‘Have I been so long with you and yet hast thou not 
known me?” We question whether the Power that 
made*us really knows anything of the pain and 
passion of our living—and there are held out to us 
the pierced hands. We brood darkly upon the 
future, its complications and its mysteries, and he 
speaks again the word of illumination and of promise: 
“In my Father’s house are many abiding-places— 
I will come again and receive you unto myself.” 
We can pray indeed, no deeper prayer than: this— 
that we may not fail to recognize the answers to 
our praying. And if we could win the power to 
recognize them fully, it might be that most of our 
prayers would change into thanksgivings. 

Moreover, study of the history and teaching of 


172 SHARING IN CREATION 


Jesus reveals two far-reaching principles of God’s 
provision for human life. There is first his provision 
for human joy. We are accustomed to draw our 
pictures of Jesus mainly from the last days of his 
life when the shadows were darkening around him, 
and so he seems to us only the Man of Sorrows. 
But there had been sunny days before that time for 
the child at play in Nazareth, for the youth, swift 
to feel all the beauty of his Father’s world and eager 
to mingle with the many-colored life that flowed 
around him, for the young preacher gathering to 
him the youth of Galilee to hear the good news of 
the Kingdom of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. 
The thought of joy was often in his mind and words 
of joy often on his lips. ‘‘Rejoice with me.” “Joy 
shall be in heaven.”’ ‘‘Your sorrow shall be turned 
into joy.” “These things I speak in the world that 
they may have my joy made full in themselves.” It 
was sung of him at his nativity that his birth meant 
good tidings of great joy to all peoples. Never was 
poet more hopelessly wrong than Swinburne when 
he wrote of this Man who has poured into all human 
life the poetry and the pageantry of his flaming ideals: 


Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has 
grown gray at thy breath. 


The Son of Man came not to destroy men’s lives but 
to save them, to redeem them out of tawdriness 
into beauty, out of heaviness into joy. And no man 
is yet fully of his fellowship who fails to rejoice in 
the loveliness of the earth, the warmth of its happy 
comradeships, and the alluring interest of its tasks. 

But if God’s will for men includes the duty of 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 173 


joy, it also includes the duty of service. It is of 
God’s providence that the individual life can be 
realized only through service of the whole of life. 
The purpose of God is quite obviously not the 
cultivation of a few selected individuals, it is a 
social purpose; it is the creation of a spiritual family. 
It is in and through the social ideal of the Kingdom 
of God that the life of the individual must be ful- 
filled. That truth comes to us today with fresh 
emphasis. We are learning that the best-protected 
individual can not be perfectly safe from disease 
while his brother in the same town is ill; and that 
fact stands a parable of many things. The moral 
outcome is a demand for self-realization through 
service; and service means sacrifice. 

But if this is a requirement of God for us, we 
are assured that it is also His method for Himself. 
The incarnation is the sign and symbol to us that 
God is the sacrificial servant of the world. And a 
thoroughly Christianized idea of providence will not 
fail to face the fact that the purpose of God, which 
included the possibility of the cross for Jesus, may 
make the severest demands upon his disciples. He 
that would share in the work of God has set his feet 
upon a long road, and there is no likelihood that 
it will be an easy one. And it is in the spirit of 
religious loyalty to a God worthy of utmost loyalty, 
that this prospect can best be accepted. It is, truly, 
a libel upon human nature to assume that it can be 
faithful only to him who offers it ease. At the 
battle of the Wilderness a brigade of Georgians 
going to the front caught sight of General Lee 
standing at the edge of a bit of wood; and weary 


174 SHARING IN CREATION 


men, marked for death within the hour, threw their 
caps into the air and cheered their Providence who 
was sending them—into action. 

There is, after all is said, no final solution of 
the problems of providence save on the religious 
level, and those who would leave religion to one 
side in the discussion have before them only an 
abstraction. In fact, on the Christian view, religion 
is itself the very heart of the providence of God. It 
is the essence of God’s plan that we should con- 
sciously link up our lives with Him and work with 
Him towards His ends, that thus become also ours. 
And with the light of religion upon them the problems 
of providence tend to change from speculative 
problems into practical ones. They become less 
material for debate and more appeals for action. 
There are inequalities of life and opportunity in the 
world—that is a thing to be remedied with God. 
Society is organized partly upon a pagan rather than 
a Christian basis; Christianity is far from having 
won complete control even of the most Christian 
nations—these are things to be remedied with God. 
Reflection suggests that ours is really an unfinished 
world. We are called of God to unite with Him 
initscontinuing creation. Religion is the response of 
man tothat appeal, converting the problem of theory 
into a problem of practice. And the last answers to 
our deepest questions must be given not in words but 
in action—given in the history that wemake with God. 

Was it for mere fool’s play, make-believe and mumming, 

So we battled it like men, not boy-like sulked and whined? 


Each of us heard clang God’s ‘‘Come!’”’ and each was coming: 
Soldiers all, to forward-face, not sneaks to lag behind! 


THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD 175 


How of the field’s fortune? That concerned our Leader! 

Led, we struck our stroke, nor cared for doings left and right: 

Each, as on his sole head, failer or succeeder, 

Lay the blame or lit the praise: no care for cowards; fight! 

Providence, for the Christian, is in its deepest 
meaning, the opportunity of man to fulfill in joy, 
in service, and in sacrifice, the best that is in him. 
And each man must say, in the last resort, how and 
when his opportunities came to him. Certainly it 
would seem that there are many to whom, in this 
life, no full opportunity comes at all. Nor is this 
fact, on the Christian view, of supreme importance, 
for we understand that this world is but a fragment 
of the whole. But it belongs to those whose ears 
have been quickened to hear God’s call to study 
the fragment; to discern, as best we can, what God 
is doing and so find what He would have us do. It 
may be that we shall be able to spell out but a little 
of the great purpose in which we play a part; shall 
see the full meaning of none of the great ideals 
that we are called upon to serve. We are children 
still when we die. And we shall have to trust God to 
take our blundering attempts at helping Him and 
somehow build them into the fabric of the whole 
so that they will not show too awkwardly. 

We can even see, after a fashion, that this is 
what He really does. Often it seems that our best 
work takes the form of building better than we know. 
The prophets of Israel, seeking to deal with the vex- 
ing problems of their own time, created ethical 
monotheism and so laid the foundations of Chris- 
tianity. Anaxagoras, declaring that “mind came 


176 SHARING IN CREATION 


and ordered all things” lays the first stone of the 
mighty structure of Greek Idealism: of its final 
consequences he does not dream. A man discovers 
the power resident in steam and changes the whole 
tune of human life. A sailor, seeking a northwest 
passage to the fabled kingdom of Prester John, 
stumbles upon a new world and dies unknowing that 
he has found it. So we walk our own ways and at the 
the same time find ourselves pressed along ways 
leading to issues vaster than we conceive; work at 
our own tasks and find, later, that we have been 
unwitting workers at a larger task; strike out a frag- 
ment of melody in our own lives only to find it taken 
up and incorporated in a vaster music. Our life 
seems to be at once independent and shepherded, 
the result of numberless plans within the compass 
of a larger planning, the outcome of human initiative 
and of the Providence of God.?° 


20 ‘‘The real world must be the joint result of God and man (including under 
this term other finite intelligences both higher and lower in the scale), unless we are 
to deny the reality of that in us which leads us to the idea of God at all’’ (Ward, 
Realm of Ends, 352). 





CHAPTER V 
THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 


The time has now come when we must face as 
honestly as we can a group of facts that are often 
regarded as the flat contradiction and denial of that 
theistic and Christian view of the world which we 
have been considering. We have been trying to 
think out some of the larger consequences that follow 
if we regard our world as a place in which are being 
worked out worthy purposes of a personal God. But 
we should be taking altogether too facile a view if we 
presented that conclusion as the most obvious 
meaning of all the facts. The fairly comfortable 
smoothness of our course thus far has been partly 
due, indeed, to the exclusion of some of them. It 
is, of course, true that we can not hope to collect 
and interpret all the facts of our world; we can only 
attempt to single out those that seem to be most 
characteristic and significant. But surely there is 
no body of facts that is more strikingly character- 
istic of the world than those that we group under the 
head of suffering. And any interpretation of life 
that claims to reflect reality with any degree of 
faithfulness must take honest account of this darker 
side of our experience. 

These facts must be faced, too, if we desire to 
think our way through to any hopefully religious 

177 


178 SHARING IN CREATION 


view of the world that is also secure. It is, of course, 
possible to maintain a certain sort of optimism by 
attending only to facts of a certain sort. But an 
optimism that depends upon inattention is an 
unstable position, liable to be overthrown by the 
first strong blast of personal ill-fortune. A sunny 
outlook on life is easy enough in the sunshine; but 
for full mastery of the art of life there is wanted 
the more experienced cheerfulness which has learned 
how to find life worth living even when it lies in the 
shadow. And any optimism that is more than an 
insecure emotional attitude must be an optimism 
which has taken full account of the facts that make 
for pessimism. Contentment with life purchased 
by ignorance of it is too cheaply bought and too 
lightly held. To hold it firmly we must, as Prof. 
Hocking has said, 


be free to open ourselves wholly, in imagination, 
and in fact, if need be, to the whole of human 
experience. If there is anything which destiny 
may thrust upon us or has thrust upon others, 
and which we have to hide from or banish from 
thought, we are not happy..... If I can 
reconcile myself to the certainty of death only 
by forgetting it, I am not happy. And if I 
can dispose of the fact of human misery about 
me only by shutting my thought as well as 
myself within my comfortable garden, I may 
assure myself that I am happy, but I am not. 
There is a skeleton in the closet of the universe; 
and at any moment I may be in face of it.! 


1 Meaning of God in Human Ezpertence, 218. 


THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 179 


Tue PROBLEM DEFINED 


The problem could at least-be simplified if we 
were able to say, as has sometimes been said, that 
all suffering is the result of sin. We should, of 
course, still have the problem of sin on our hands, 
but our intellectual difficulties about suffering would 
be largely removed. Where a close connection can 
be traced between sin and pain, no special difficulty 
is felt. Sin, we normally feel, ought to be followed 
by suffering. But that solution is not a practicable 
one. It is as certain as can be that suffering was in 
the world long beforesin. Nature had known painlong 
before man appeared upon the scene. Androcles’ 
lion with the thorn in his foot raised the problem 
just as really as any human experience. Death, 
too, has been always the natural end of all organisms, 
and death means some measure of physical distress. 
And among men death involves not only distress for 
the individual but, for his friends and kinsmen, that 
sharpest sort of suffering that we name sorrow. 
It is certain, therefore, that man is, indeed, “born 
to trouble as the sparks fly upward.”’ Jesus himself 
shattered the theory of complete correlation between 
sin and suffering when he forbade his followers to 
interpret without discrimination every human dis- 
aster as the penalty of wickedness. ‘Those eighteen 
upon whom the tower of Siloam fell, and killed them, 
think ye that they were offenders above all men 
that dwell in Jerusalem. I tell you, Nay.’ Sin, 


28t. Luke xiii.4-5. 





180 SHARING IN CREATION 


it is true, does involve suffering, and an immense 
portion of the world’s pain is due to the sins of men. 
But there is much suffering that has no connection 
with wrong-doing; indeed, in our present world, 
increase of goodness may bring increase of pain. 
It is not the reckless and indifferent son who suffers 
most as the consequence of his misdeed; it is the 
mother who must watch him going out on the dark 
ways. It was not sin but Goodness that was cruci- 
fied on Calvary. — 

The real relation between sin and suffering 
would make a discussion of sin entirely pertinent in 
this connection. ‘Though we can not say with any 
precision, it is even possible that the larger part 
of the evils that men endure are due to their own 
misdoing. And it is obvious that any general 
increase in goodness would carry with it general 
alleviations of human distress. But an attempt to 
deal with the problems raised by sin would lead 
us at once into questions too complicated to be 
handled within the scope of these lectures. We 
must be content, for the present, to isolate—some- 
what artificially, it must be confessed—the problem of 
suffering from its companion question and to focus 
upon so much of it as belongs to life apart from sin. 

The indictment of the world can be made 
arresting enough on the ground of its savagery 
alone. It has never been drawn more vividly than 
by J. S. Mill: ‘“‘Nature impales men, breaks them 
as if on a wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild 
beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with 
stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them 
with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them 


THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 181 


with the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, 
and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, 
such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabi or a Domitian 
never surpassed. All this Nature does with the most 
supercilious disregard both of mercy and justice.’’$ 
And Tennyson in the introduction to In Memoriam 
conceives religion as a naked venture of faith in 
the face of the unrestrained cruelty of Nature. He 
speaks of himself as one 

Who trusted God was love indeed, 

And Love Creation’s final law, 


Though Nature, red in tooth and claw 
With ravin, shrieked against his creed. 


Looking at the world in this fashion we seem 
to be living in a physical system which embodies 
no moral or spiritual principles. And our only 
chance of salvation lies in setting ourselves sternly 
to combat the system, not in co-operation with it. 
Man’s moral life must take, as Huxley suggested in 
his Romanes Lecture, the form of a struggle of 
human nature against Nature. And religion becomes 
a sheer act of faith in the face of facts that contradict 
it. Or else God, the object of religion, must be 
conceived, in the fashion of H. G. Wells and the 
radical pluralists, not as the Founder of our system 
but as the Invisible King who lives only in the 
system along with us, dependent upon it, seeking 
to master it. With Him we can make alliance; but 
behind Him stands the System, impersonal, non- 
moral, or anti-moral. And our best hope was that 
with the help of our powerful Ally we should capture 
the pirate ship of the world and turn it into a 


’ Three Hssaus on Religion, p. 29. 





182 SHARING IN CREATION 


respectable craft. Religion is a mutiny among the 
slaves chained to the oars of a vast and cruel trireme. 
It may seem, it is true, that our chances of success 
are but slender. For the ship in which we sail is 
not one that man has made but one that makes 
man, permits him a brief life, and then drops him 
out into great waters that are part of the System. 
But certainly any chance, however desperate, is 
worth taking if it is the only chance. The question 
is whether we are shut in to such a course or whether 
a more hopeful outlook is possible. Can religious 
philosophy offer no solution of the problem less 
fantastic than this? 

It is to be noted, to begin with, that only through 
a religious philosophy is there any hope of a real 
solution. Indeed, we may go further and say that 
only on a theistic view of the world is there any 
problem. ‘Those who feel the problem most keenly 
do so in view of an inner demand for justice and 
fairness which they make upon the world—a demand 
that is utterly irrelevant if there be no responsible 
Power at work in it. We can not in one and the 
same breath pronounce the world Godless and cruel, 
for cruelty can be a characteristic only of personal 
beings. Mi§ll’s arraignment of Nature, quoted above, 
sounds convincing only because he has personalized 
Nature as an intelligent Power who ‘“‘slays,” “‘tor- 
ments,” and ‘‘devises tortures.” All writing of that 
sort is “mere misleading rhetoric,” if it describes 
an impersonal, purposeless, non-ethical system. 
From the point of view of a Naturalistic philosophy 
the fact of suffering may be noted as due to such 
and such causes, but there is no reason for feeling 


THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 183 


about it either moral indignation or moral approval. 
It becomes just a thing to be fought with such 
courage or desperation as we can muster, to be 
escaped as far as possible, to be endured with Indian 
stoicism when we are caught. Nor is there any 
reason to be either hopeful or hopeless about the 
future. The universe is certainly not under our 
control; its purposeless changes might bring into 
being for a time a sort of physical paradise; they 
might equally well, as Prof. Fraser has pointed out, 
create a sort of permanent hell, ‘‘charged with 
literally unutterable misery for all sentient beings.” 
This is why William James calls pessimism ‘‘an 
essentially religious disease.” ‘The nightmare view 
of life,’ he says, ‘‘has plenty of organic sources; 
but its great reflective source has at all times been 
the contradiction between the phenomena of nature 
and the craving of the heart to believe that behind 
nature there is a spirit whose expression nature 
is... . No brute can have this sort of melan- 
choly; no man who is unreligious can become its 
prey. It is the sick shudder of the frustrated 
religious demand, and not the mere necessary 
outcome of animal experience.’’4 

We are entitled, therefore, to approach the 
problem from the standpoint of a Christian view of 
the world. Taken in this fashion, it may be stated 
somewhat as follows. We find ourselves in a world 
which can be understood in large and fruitful ways 
in the light of the idea of God; in a life which can 
be lived hopefully and with enthusiasm through 
religious faith in God. But the world also contains 


4 The Will to Believe, pp. 40, 42. 





184 SHARING IN CREATION 


a group of facts which do not carry such an inter- 
pretation on their face, which are widely felt to 
make against such a faith. The question then 
becomes, Is it possible to find a deeper interpretation 
of them which does not contradict, but is in line 
with our previous conclusions? We can, in large 
part, follow through the world the trail of goodness 
and of purpose; does that trail here become too 
faint for us to follow it any further? When massive 
evidence points towards a certain conclusion, which 
a residuum of outstanding facts seems to contradict, 
it is customary for us to restudy these latter facts 
and make sure whether we have understood them 
aright. They constitute a true ‘“‘problem,” a 
difficulty of which there is the possibility of a 
solution. And this would seem to be the right 
method here. Js the world, we may ask, as black 
as it is sometimes painted? Is suffering without any 
meanings worthy of moral purpose? May it not 
be that out of the dark facts themselves we may 
wring meanings that, in part at least, bring them 
within the sphere of religious thought and convert 
them into a means of life? It is in finding the 
answers to questions of this sort that we may hope 
to move towards a solution of the problem of 
suffering. 

The problem, so stated, is plainly a concrete 
problem. And it makes all the difference in the 
world whether a question be put abstractly or 
in its proper setting. For example, to the general 
question, ‘“Can kindness deliberately inflict pain?” 
only a negative answer seems possible. And yet— 
pace some current theories of child-training—every 


THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 185 


human home knows it is not the only one. So the 
question before us is often stated in terms purely 
abstract and speculative. ‘‘How,” it is said triumph- 
antly, “can you square up the presence of suffering 
in the world with the idea of God’s omnipotence?” 
But obviously to put it in this way involves a whole 
series of assumptions that are really subject to 
investigation. It is assumed that suffering can have 
no value, that the only worthy end of life is happiness, 
that therefore creative wisdom and goodness can 
not possibly admit suffering into its world. But 
these are just the things to be determined. We have 
really answered the question in the act of asking 
it without ever looking seriously at the facts. 
Moreover, there is involved in such a way of 
putting the question an impossible definition of the 
omnipotence of God. We are understanding it in 
vacuo without reference to reason or purpose. And 
it may well be that we are taking it to mean power 
to do the impossible, power rationally to construct 
the irrational and unthinkable.’ We are, in fact, 
taking a perfectly empty word, picked out of the 
dictionary, and using it as a test for judging ex- 
perience, whereas it is from experience that the 
word itself must get its meaning. Omnipotence is 
not an empty concept functioning in the void. The 
divine power is for the Christian the power of God 
working out a particular purpose in a particular 
world. It is power expressing a character and 


5 “‘Omnipotence, I fear, is one of those question-begging epithets that every- 
body uses and nobody defines. Thus it is not uncommonly taken to imply not 
merely the power to do whatever it is possible to do, but also the power arbitrarily 
to determine what shall be possible; in short, that omnipotence absolutely excludes 
impossibility. .... Metaphysic of this sort is not to be met by argument,” 
(Ward, Realm of Ends, 354), 





186 SHARING IN CREATION 


forging the means for the realization of an ideal. 
It is power seeking a definite result. And this 
means that it is determinate power, governed by 
its own ends and informed with its own wisdom.° 
This is the proper force of the word “Almighty” 
as ordinarily applied to God. As the English 
translation of the Greek word pantokrator and of 
the Latin omnipotens, it means “all-ruling,” ‘‘all- 
sovereign,” not “‘able to do anything that fancy may 
suggest.’’? It expresses the belief that God is in 
supreme control of our world and that His power 
is adequate to meet its needs. And it is not by 
arbitrary definition but in and through our ex- 
perience that we are to learn its meaning and form 
some dim idea of its range. And our task is not 
the meaningless one of reconciling imaginary con- 
tradictories but of finding out whether the presence 
of pain in our world is consistent with the character 
and purpose of our God. ‘The only question that 
can be raised to edification is whether the actual 


6 ‘Omnipotence can only mean—as I find it expressed in a recent Catholic 
manual—the ‘power to effect whatever is not intrinsically impossible.’ The 
intrinsic necessities which govern the possibilities are not, because they are called 
intrinsic, to be regarded as a metaphysical fate behind God; or an impersonal 
system of ‘eternal truths’ to which He is forced to submit. The foundations of the 
intelligible universe are the necessities of the divine nature itself; and to separate 
God’s Being, as Power or Will, from his Nature is the ultimate form of the apotheosis 
of the empty Ego which we have already repeatedly condemned”’ (Pringle-Pattison, 
Idea of God, p. 404). 


7 See any good commentary on The Apostles Creed. 


8“'T venture to say that unless God does operate within experience in an 
identifiable manner, speculation will not find him, and may be abandoned. The 
need for metaphysical thought arises . ... just because God is matter of 
experience, because he works there andis known there in his works..... Men 
do not first imagine a God in abstracto, then speculate about his possible powers, 
and then at last enquire whether such a Being exists. They begin at the other 
end. They find their God (as James puts it) in rebus’’ (Hocking, Meaning of God, 
etc., p. 216). 


THE PROBLEM .OF SUFFERING 187 


system is compatible with creative goodness or 
not.’’® 


IT 


THE DIMENSIONS OF THE PROBLEM 


It is important, also, that the problem be held 
within its proper dimensions. There is, it is true, 
such a thing as a merely sentimental optimism that 
lives by denial or disregard of the facts. It is this 
smooth—and sometimes rather repellent—attitude 
that gives rise to the familiar definition of a pessimist 
as a person who has to live with a persistent optimist. 
But there is also such a thing as a merely emotional 
and sentimental pessimism. One may by an effort 
of the imagination bring together into one composite 
mental picture all the kinds of pain that exist in the 
world, so that suffering is seen concentratedly rather 
than distributively. We may reflect upon the ab- 
stractions ‘‘pain” and “man” until we forget that 
there are only separate pains borne by individual 
men. Individual compensations may be neglected, 
and it may be forgotten that there are not many 
particular lives in which suffering is the main feature. 
And then one may leave utterly out of account the 
massive and multitudinous facts of happiness and 
joy. Thus a partial view of life may be allowed to 
dominate the mind until a man is able with some 
appearance of sincerity to write or speak as if the 
world were no more than a vast torture chamber 
with life forever stretched screaming on the rack. 

The lives of most men and animals do not, 

9 Bowne, Theism, p. 266. 





188 SHARING IN CREATION 


however, correspond in the least to such a picture; 
and to look outward upon actual life is to see another 
side to it. Outside the window the bird is singing 
in the tree-top his full-throated melody of the joy 
of life, even though the shadow of the bird-hawk 
may presently still his song. ‘I vote for life,” he 
seems to say, “even if there is a hawk in it.’’ Inside 
the chamber the baby is splashing in his tub, and 
the mother remembereth no more her anguish for 
joy that a man is born into the world. Friendship 
and love are at their daily work of enriching human 
existence; journeys end in lovers’ meetings; and old 
men, with one foot in the grave, creep about taking 
an undefeated joy in one more day of life. It can 
not be said that either the dread of pain or the normal 
experience of it casts a permanent shadow over life 
as a whole. 

There are, it must be admitted, few men who 
get past middle age without having received some 
sharp wounds—and the scars throb and ache in 
the soul’s bad weather. But there are not many 
who have found living an altogether intolerable 
business. Nor to souls with a touch of courage do 
most of their own ills seem things to be taken too 
seriously. The hospitals are full of bright faces 
eager for the news; soldiers in battle fail to notice 
that they have been wounded; Roosevelt finishes 
his speech with a bullet in his breast; and starved 
little girls in slums dance around the Italian organ- 
grinder. Writes Dr. Hutchison Stirling: ‘We shall 
not speak of love or of one’s daily meals, or of science 
or of Shakespeare; but he who has clomb a moun- 
tain, who has heard a bird in the woods, who has 


THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 189 


known a mother, who has seen a shoe or sock of his 
own child—he will bow the knee and thank God 
and call it good.’’!® 

There is no intention here to minimize the fact 
of suffering but only to reduce it to its proper pro- 
portions. It were easy, of course, to turn the picture 
and begin to count up the evils of lfe—and an 
appalling list of them could be made. But the. 
problem is not to be solved by matching literary 
dexterities against each other. It is in life that the 
problem exists, aud those who have endured hardness 
and known joy have small patience with merely 
literary optimism or pessimism. One wonders, 
indeed, whether a certain amount of current pessi- 
mism be not born of inexperience rather than of 
experience, of satiety rather than of sensibility, of 
a passion for physical comfort almost become a 
religion, of too much rather than of too little ease. 
It was a man who had known poverty and hunger 
and loss, who had lived for years under the imminent 
shadow of death—it was Robert Louis Stevenson 
who wrote: 


If I have faltered more or less 

In my great task of happiness; 

If I have moved among my race 

And shown no glorious morning face; 
If beams from happy human eyes 
Have moved me not; if morning skies, 
Books, and my food, and summer rain, 
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain; 
Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take 
And stab my spirit broad awake. 


10 James Hutchison Stirling, His Life and Work, p, 251. 


190 SHARING IN CREATION 


It may, indeed, be stated as a fact that man, 
like God, has looked upon the world and seen that 
it is good. Whatever may be the judgment of an 
occasional individual, the judgment of historical man 
is clear. Were the earth the chamber of horrors 
that it is sometimes made out to be, we might have 
escaped it long ago by the simple process of giving 
up the game. But from amoeba to man, the rhythm 
of life has been in point of fact optimistic and, in 
spite of its pains, life has been found to be worth 
living. The dominant impulses in nature, as J. A. 
Thomson has shown, are the positive ones, hunger 
and love: the typical movement of life is not the 
sensitive tentacle withdrawing itself from painful 
contacts; it is the tentacle thrusting itself forward 
and feeling its way into new experience. And in 
spite of all failures and retrogressions the upward 
thrust of history continues; man clings to life, and 
desires, in this world, to live it more abundantly. 
We habitually welcome a new life into the world 
with rejoicings, whereas on a radically pessimistic 
view we ought to lament the fact that another soul 
has undergone the disaster of birth. And surely 
this typical human attitude towards life has in it a 
suggestion for theory. Life has, so to say, taken 
pain in its stride. And this would seem to indicate 
that it is susceptible of being understood optimistic- 
ally. Men “have always assumed,” says Prof. 
Hocking, ‘‘that pain is to be explained.’’? And the 
religious thinker, before he dismisses it as unmixed 
evil, will do well to look for possible explanations. 


THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 191 


III 
SomE ViTAL VALUES OF PAIN 


In quest of such possible meanings of pain we 
may go, first, to the animal world. And though 
it is from this world that the most lurid pictures 
are usually drawn, it should be recognized to begin 
with that pain is probably much less severe there 
than it is in human life. The intensity of our 
reaction against the suffering of animals is due, in 
part, to the fact that they seem to be without the 
spiritual compensations that help to make it en- 
durable among men. There is a peculiar pathos in 
the dumb uncomprehending endurance of the 
animal. But capacity for suffering varies with the 
degree of nervous organization—the experience that 
seems severe to one man is hardly noticed by 
another—and there is reason for thinking that in 
the animal world suffering is at the minimum. 
Then, too, animals take life as it comes—they are 
saved from prospect and retrospect which make up 
so large a part of human pain. And, generally 
speaking, it would seem to be a mistake to read 
into an animal experience the intensity which it 
would have for a man. “In the great majority of 
cases,’ says J. A. Thomson, ‘“‘violent death is rapid 
and probably painless and the accusation of cruelty 
is an irrelevant anthropomorphism.’’!! 

But when all necessary deductions have been 
made, pain still remains a pervasive feature of the 
world below man. And we can see that it is a 
feature not altogether without meaning. It performs 


ul System, etc., p. 586. 





192 SHARING IN CREATION 


certain functions in the creative process. It has, 
for example, an obvious value as a danger signal.” 
It serves as a warning to the organism of the presence 
and action of hostile and destructive forces. The 
pangs that come of over-feeding or ill-advised 
feeding; “the aching wound and weakness, that 
sends the organism into a period of rest,’”’ the painful 
contact that warns it what to avoid; the fear that 
quickens the senses in the presence of an enemy— 
in these ways, among others, pain fulfills certain 
functions in the scheme of things. It serves as a 
“stimulus to avoidance’; itis ‘‘a red-light burning on 
the path of life.” 

But more than this, it would seem that the 
severer side of life has a certain positive creative 
value. The phenomena of hunt and capture, of fear 
and flight, of wary approach and skillful avoidance, 
of muscles tense and senses alert for instant defence 
or flight, the incessant thrust and riposte of the 
struggle for existence—we can understand how all 
this must have helped, throughout the historic 
process, to tune up life to speed of reaction and to 
develop its sensitiveness. Even in the world of 
man, with all the pull of spiritual ideals and ambi- 
tions persuasively in action, the organism that is 
released from all strain and hardship tends to 
decay into softness and incapacity; in the sub-human 
world the spur of dangerous living would seem to 
be all the more necessary. 

In the light of such considerations as these it 
begins to look as if the trail of purpose were opening 
up again. The tragic side of life seems to be an 


2 This paragraph is based largely on the writings of the biologist J. A. Thomson, 





THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 193 


element in the making of life, one of the factors 
that breed initiative, force adaptation, elicit re- 
sourcefulness, quicken invention; one of the tools, 
though not, even at this stage, the most important, 
that shape life into forms of strength and beauty; 
not an utterly unintelligible intrusion into the world 
process, but a functional element in it. “It is not 
that there is one law of death and quite another of 
life,’ said Henry Scott Holland, in a well-known 
sermon, ‘‘but that the very principle of death is 
turned into being the principle of a fuller and 
richer life.’’18 

We are on clearer because better known ground 
when we turn to human experience, though here, 
indeed, all the elements-in the problem are inten- 
sified. For the increased sensibility of man means 
increased suffering—the larger possibility of joy 
carries with it the possibility of deeper pain. But 
the fundamental suggestion of this chapter is that 
we can trace here, experimentally, the same sort of 
correlation that we observed in the animal world. 
First, everything that was said in that connection 
of the prophylactic function of pain would seem to 
apply. If we are to have both fires and children, 
it is well that the burnt child should learn to dread 
the fire. But it is in its creative aspect that we 
find the correlation most significant. Many of our 
disasters come through our collisions with the 
regular sweep and movement of the forces that 
operate around us. But that very regularity is, as 
we have seen, the condition and means of our 


13 Logic and Life, p. 84. 





194 SHARING IN CREATION 


growth.'4 The possibility of a science or knowledge 
of Nature depends upon her regularity, and her 
apparent remorselessness is a stimulus to activity. 
An unfailing supply of special rescues in every 
dangerous emergency would probably, in any past 
stage of human life, have slowed down progress 
tremendously or put an end to it altogether. It 
would have meant the encouragement not of enter- 
prise and effort but of inertia and slothfulness. 
The three wise men of Gotham could really have 
gone to sea in a bowl and their life-story been none 
the shorter for their folly. 

Similar rash experiments in other directions 
accompanied by guarantees against pain would give 
us in time quite a different world from ours—a 
world in which no one could possibly get hurt, in 
which hunger always found food waiting at its 
elbow, in which ignorance carried no penalties and 
wisdom brought no rewards, in which carelessness 
and energy stood on an equal survival footing. 
Such a world might be a pleasant enough change 
for a week or so—as one wishes in the first few days 
of a vacation that its delightful irresponsibility 
might last forever—but it may be doubted whether 
it would be good for us. It may even be doubted 
whether we should like it for any length of time. 
We might find that Elysium was but another name 
for boredom. 

It seems likely, indeed, that nothing could be 
more dangerous to life than to shut it away from all 


4 ‘Without regularity in the world, there can be no probability about human 
life; no prediction, no prudence, no accumulation of ordered experience, no forma- 
tion of habit, no possibility of character, progress or culture—in a word, neither 
intelligent nor moral life’ (Tennant, Elements of Pain, etc., p. 102). 





THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 195 


danger; to eliminate all strain, all possibility of hurt; 
so to pad and cushion it that all shocks and endur- 
ances were eliminated. ‘This were not to make life 
but to mar it, to soften it and make it flabby, to 
breed in the last resort not happiness but inertia. 
And it is in the interests of vigorous life that our 
system sets a certain premium upon adaptability, 
vigilance, willingness to take risks, incessant effort 
to capture and control the powers of nature, ability 
to keep one’s footing in the shifting melée of life. 
‘May it not be, then, that Nature is remorseless in 
order that she may be beneficent—that she stoops 
to be conquered? May it not be that she pits her- 
self against us as the fencing-master pits himself 
against his pupil, eager to develop the quick eye, the 
flexible muscle, the swift brain, the educated skill? 
We can see, perhaps, that to live with full cheer- 
fulness and enthusiasm in such a system, accepting 
the risks with a stout heart, were to breed the man. 
And it happens that we have in nature—not to speak 
of human nature—a clear example of what comes of 
successful avoidance of hardship. For there is one 
type of life that has solved the problem of pain by 
the way of escape from the rigors of ordinary exist- 
ence. It is the degenerate parasite, sunk into 
a lethargy below the level of sensibility or action. 
Dare we ask, for the present at least, that this shall 
cease to be a difficult world? 

When we reflect upon the development of the 
more definitely ethical and religious qualities the 
experimental and historic correlation between pain 
and vital value seems closer still. Is it not a fact, 
apart from any theory of the fact, that just those 


196 SHARING IN CREATION 


virtues which we most prize in men emerge and take 
shape in relation with the difficulties of life? If 
danger sometimes creates cowardice, it also and more 
often generates heroism, and to confront even once 
a peril or a disaster with a calm mind is to find 
oneself by that much more a man. And how plainly 
the spirit of unselfishness and self-sacrifice is bred 
and nurtured out of the urgent need among: us for 
mutual service and rescue. We learn the spirit 
of service, which is the spirit of God, through contact 
with need; we “learn to put self aside under the 
appeal of another’s sharp necessity.” And if this 
should seem to involve the abhorrent conclusion that 
we, must rise on the dead selves of others to higher 
things, yet such a logic were but a caricature of the 
actual human situation. A better spiritual common 
sense will see that the meaning really is that we are 
all in need of each other in the common enterprise 
of living and that out of our mutual assistance 
grows up our spiritual life. 

Nor can any one who has lived much in close 
touch with the common life of men fail to notice the 
socializing effects of suffering. Again and again 
one sees it eliciting from souls that seemed thin and 
meager unsuspected resources of sympathy, breaking 
down barriers of convention, healing ancient feuds. 
There is a bond between those who have rejoiced 
together in some day of gladness, but there is a 
deeper bond between those who together have become 
acquainted with grief. In darkness we reach out 
hands of comradeship to each other; nay, in darkness 
we reach out hands to God. ‘The history of religion, 
no less than one’s own ordinary experience, reveals 


THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 197 


the fact, written in burial mound and on memorial 
tablet, expressed in primitive custom and in Eleu- 
sinian mystery, that death has been in every age a 
quickener of religion, waking swiftly the thought 
of God and ruling out complete preoccupation with 
the things of time as mere frantic folly. And if this 
seems but a poor reason for fellowship with God, the 
answer is that its highest and richest types grow 
up out of its simplest beginnings, and that we can not 
affirm that any factor in its growth is unnecessary. 
We can not rate our final possibilities too high, but 
those of us who are best acquainted with ourselves 
will probably be inclined to take a modest view of 
our present achievements. ‘‘Without the presence 
of toil and sickness and sorrow and death,” said a 
great historian, who himself knew them all better 
than most men, ‘“‘I fear that few of us would care to 
face the moral facts of life and find a meaning for 
them. The lotus-eaters do not seem to have had 
much of a religion, and are not recorded to have 
produced a philosopher.’ 

There is much to be learned from the old folk- 
ways of thought. The butterfly, symbol of careless 
beauty and joy, is also the symbol of shallowness. 
That ancient symbolism records the instinctive 
feeling of men that he who would touch the whole 
meaning of life must master the secret of its pain. 
And this instinctive conviction is elucidated as in- 
creasing acquaintance with the actual texture of life 
brings us more and more into clear view of a secret 
and dexterous purposefulness which runs through 

8H. M. Gwatkin, The Knowledge of God, vol. 1, p. 126. 





198 SHARING IN CREATION 


all its warp and woof. This is a world that offers 
us in storm no less than in sunshine the opportunity 
for the production of spiritual values. 

Here the real crux of the question comes into 
view. The world, we have said, can only be under- 
stood in the light of its own purposes, and we can 
live in it with full success only so far as we adopt 
as our own the ends that itis seeking. If we attempt 
to understand the world as a system organized for 
the production of unbroken happiness or seek to 
make this the objective of our own lives, the case 
is doubly hopeless. It is in fact a dangerous world, 
in which we win happiness—and lose it—and win 
it again; and all our experience is shot through 
with the scarlet threads of tragedy. But ona worthy 
Christian view the primary objective of the world 
process is not happiness but the increase of personal 
life. And if this view be accepted, then we begin 
to see that what men need most—that what God 
needs most from men if they are to be sharers in his 
enterprises—is not immediate and undisturbed con- 
tentment but wisdom and strength, knowledge, 
mastery of the secret of creative labor, courage to 
attempt difficult tasks and tenacity to hold on in the 
face of danger or defeat, the patience to endure 
hardness, the power to give oneself to the service 
of great causes, the power to sacrifice today on the 
altar of a greater tomorrow. We can achieve, it is 
true, a certain contentment with life by restricting 
our ambitions, but no man has the right to rest 
satisfied with any happiness save the highest; and 
the highest happiness can come only as a by-product 


THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 199 


of these things.’ And it is difficult to see how we 
can possess them except by achieving them under 
the guidance of God; they are, so far as we can tell, 
things that can not be given without effort on our 
part. They must be won in the school of life.1?7 To 
make serious progress in any art a man must “‘scorn 
delights and live laborious days”: how much more 
in the supreme art of living! 

To understand this is to win a new insight into 
the nature of our world as “an immense training- 
school of possible virtue,” a school for the develop- 
ment not only of the gentler qualities but also of 
those harder and sterner ones which must be the 
frame-work and skeleton of all worthy living. And 
perhaps, as in Keat’s vision, 


We may behold upon the night’s scarred face 
Huge cloudy symbols of an high romance. 


It is the romance of Life, beginning i in the birth time 
of the world its long ascent in a system which puts 
every organism under strain and demands of it a 
definite reaction. « For the least and for the highest 
individual two roads are always possible, a downward 
path of refusal and surrender that leads toward 
degeneration; an upward path of acceptance of the 
gage of battle that leads towards the heights. It 
is a romance of life insurgent, accepting the gage; 
creative, pushing its way out towards the better 


16 ‘*We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a 
great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as 
well as for ourselves’? (George Eliot’s Romola). 

17 “Tf there be a God, he certainly has not made the world what it is to be, but 
rather endowed it with talents to enable it to work out its own perfection in con- 
junction with himself. This working out is what we call experience, and experience 
can never presuppose the knowledge or the skill that is only gained by means of it” 
(Ward, Realm of Ends, p. 356). 


200 SHARING IN CREATION 


understanding and mastery of the world. It is full 
of breathless peril and of joyous escape, of sickening 
disaster and of sudden rescue, of bitter failure and of 
success wrung from hard circumstance in despite of 
failure, of cruel wounds given and received, of Mercy 
and Pity, human and divine, coming to cleanse and 
heal the wounds—until out of the very travail of 
life is born the spirit of salvation and redemption, 
the effort to ameliorate and heal, the determination 
to create with God somehow and somewhere a life 
that is neither soft nor savage, even the life that 
Jesus called ‘‘the life indeed.’”? A romance, in truth, 
the story is, rather than a prosy chronicle; it enacts 
itself on the key of Treasure Island rather than of 
Buckle’s History of Civilization. And those who 
have played great parts in it have been indeed as 
wanderers and sojourners in the world. They have 
lived and loved and served the present with their 
eyes on distant things. - They have sought a country. 
They have understood all their labor and their pain 
in the world as the price of a greater world being born 
under their hands, reckoning the sufferings of this 
present time but a small thing compared with the 
glory which shall be revealed. 


A gifted Byron rises in his wrath; and 
feeling too surely that he for his part is not 
“happy,” declares the same in very violent 
language, as a piece of news that may be inter- 
esting. It has evidently surprised him much. 
One dislikes to see a man and poet reduced to 
proclaim on thestreets such tidings .... Nay, 
thou that has such a sacred pity left at the least 


THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 201 


for thyself, thy very pains, once gone over into 
Yesterday, become joys to thee. Besides, 
thou knowest not what heavenly blessedness, 
indispensable sanative virtue was in them; 
thou shalt only know it after many days when 
thou art wiser. . . . . The only happiness 
a brave man ever troubled himself with asking 
much about was, happiness enough to get his 
work done... . Brief brawling Day, with 
its noisy phantoms, its poor paper crowns, tinsel 
gilt, is gone; and Night, with her star-diadems, 
with her silences and her veracities is come. 
What hast thou done and how? Happiness, un- 
happiness: all that was but the wages thou hadst 

Swift, out with it; let us see thy work.® 


Herein lies the fallacy of the ancient dilemma, 
“God is either indifferent or without adequate 
power to control the system in which we live.” 
It is assumed that the goal of the world could be 
reached at once without the intervention of any 
process. Creation is identified with thaumaturgy. 
But that is thinking in isolation from all the knowl- 
edge we possess, not in relation with it. It is 
really not thinking at all but only imagining. For 
so far as we can judge it is not possible to do more 
than create the potentiality of a man and then work 
in him both to will and to do the things that will 
create his manhood. And when once we have put 
away from us the shallow ideal of an Elysium and 
have lifted our hearts to the richer ideal of eternal 
life—life fit to be eternal—then there is reason to 
Met Cartel, Past and Present, Ck. iii, ch. iv. 


202 SHARING IN CREATION 


think that our world is not badly adapted to further 
such an end. It is in its dour vigors no less than in 
its sunny hospitalities a training school for life. It 
is, indeed, a fact, admitting of no debate, that out of 
the world-process has been born the spiritual life; 
in it that life grows and swells into a many-toned 
music; through his experience of it man hears—and, 
we may hope, increasingly heeds—the high clear 
call to goodness and to God. And at this point, if 
the reasoning is valid, the issue raised by the presence 
of pain in the world has been fairly met. For we 
are no longer the victims either of a too easy opti- 
mism that blinks the facts, nor yet of a one-sided pes- 
simism. We have reached an optimistic realism, 
a realism that takes the world asit stands and yet finds 
in it the opportunity and means of spiritual creation. 
This is the view of the ethical philosopher 
Sorley. His great book, often quoted in these 
lectures, has just this for its central thesis; that 
we are confronted by the paradox of a system 
which, viewed superficially, seems callous to moral 
and personal values and yet, if it be accepted and 
co-operated with, creates and nurtures them. 


The character of a free agent is made by 
facing and fighting with obstacles; it is not 
formed along the lines of easy successful reaction 
to stimulus. Facile adaptation to familiar en- 
vironment is no test of character nor training 
in character. The personal life can not grow 
into the values of which it is capable without 
facing the hardness of circumstance and the 
strain of conflict, or without experience of 


THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 203 


failure. . .. The question at present is 
not the kind of world in which perfect goodness 
can exist, but the kind of world in which 
goodness can begin to grow and make progress 
towards perfection . . . . And I will hazard 
the statement that an imperfect world is 
necessary for the growth and training of moral 
beings . . . . These spirits have had their 
beginnings at the lowest levels of organic life. 
They must fight their way upward through the 
long stages of man’s development. In this 
progress, they have to attain to reason and 
freedom so that the good may be known and 
chosen: until, tried by every kind of circum- 
stance, they find and assimilate the values 
which can transform the world and make 
themselves fit for the higher spiritual life.!9 


This, too, is the wisdom of John Drinkwater, 
in his Abraham Lincoln: 


This is wonder, always, everywhere; 

Not that vast mutability which is event; 

The pits and pinnacles of change, 

But man’s desire and valiance that range 

All circumstance, and come to port unspent. 
Agents are these events, these ecstasies 

And tribulations, to prove the purities 

Or poor oblivions that are our being. 

When beauty and peace possess us, they are none 
Save as they touch the beauty and peace of men. 
Nor when our days are done 

And the last utterance of doom must fall 

Is the doom anything 

Memorable for its apparelling. 

The bearing of man facing it is all. 





19 Moral Values, p. 343-4. 


204 SHARING IN CREATION 


‘But he that creeps from cradle on to grave,” 


said Shakespeare, 
Unskilled save in the velvet course of fortune 
Hath missed the discipline of noble hearts. 


It is the wisdom of Jesus. “In your patience,” he said, “ye 
shall win your souls.” 


IV 
SUFFERING AND THE PURPOSE OF THE WORLD 


At this point the speculative problem turns 
again—as all problems must finally do—into a 
practical one. Nor is it simply the problem of 
realizing one’s own possibilities but of assisting, so 
far as in us lies, in the realization of the possibilities 
of us all. I have spoken of this world as a training 
school for the spiritual life. But such a description 
does not quite satisfy us or fully picture the facts. 
For a training school has meaning only as a prepa- 
ration for active service; its interest lies in the 
fact that it looks beyond itself. And the conception 
of the world as no more than a sort of spiritual 
gymnasium for the purpose of turning out spiritual 
athletes lacks just the essential thing that makes 
endurance worth while. If all our sacrifices and 
strenuosities have no end beyond our own souls 
something is lost from the dignity of living. 

But this is not the actual look of our world. 
We have reason for regarding it as a field for service 
now as well as a preparation for larger service to 
come. For its chief visible goal is a spiritual society 
using the physical system for spiritual ends in 
fellowship with God, and men may make themselves 
the servants of a social ideal and of an universal 
purpose. And so there may come to birth in a 


THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 205 


man an outward-looking loyalty, which has in it 
nothing merely selfish, to a cause and a purpose the 
service of which is at the same time the fulfillment 
of the individual. Nor can such loyalty take any 
form so direct and practical as the religious form 
of loyalty to God. The ideal of the service of men, 
unless it be set in a larger light, may easily degenerate 
into the service of very private and even very 
superficial interests. The statesman may be content 
with the service of his nation—perhaps only of his 
nation’s ideal of itself. But the loyal service of God 
means the service of all and of the highest interests 
of all. And for Christians this means specifically 
the service of the historical purposes of Jesus. 

And Jesus sought to put himself at the head of 
a movement that was something more than a prac- 
tice-march. He spoke of human life not only in 
terms of training but also in terms of real responsi- 
bility. Men are as servants entrusted with the 
administration of a household, as rulers set over 
cities, as servants set to work in a vineyard to make 
things grow. He would have us feel assured that 
our life is what it seems to be—a real struggle for a 
great good; that this is one of God’s dangerous 
stars, only partially subdued to spiritual uses; that 
the final solution of the problem of suffering is to be 
found in the discovery of an end that is worth the 
cost. It is a significant and enlightening fact that 
this problem, which bulks so large in the Old Testa- 
ment in the Book of Job and elsewhere, hardly 
appears at all in the New Testament. And it does 
not appear because the writers of the New Testament 
had been taught of Jesus to see the world in a new 


206 SHARING IN CREATION | 


fashion. They were disciples of one who ‘“‘for the 
joy that was set before him endured the cross 
despising the shame.” ‘They had found a cause 
worth the gift of a human life. And for them, all 
lesser problems had been swallowed up in the one great 
problem of putting into effect the purpose of God. 


Probably to almost everyone of us here 
the most adverse life would seem well worth 
living if we could only be certain that our 
bravery and patience with it were terminating 
and eventuating and bearing fruit somewhere 
in an unseen spiritual world. . . . For my 
own part, I do not know what the sweat and 
blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they 
mean anything short of this. If this life be 
not a real fight in which something is eternally 
gained for the universe by success, it is no 
better than a game of private theatricals from 
which one may withdraw at will. But it feels 
like a real fight—as if there were something 
really wild in the universe which we, with all 
our idealities and faithfulnesses are needed to 
redeem; and first of all to redeem our own 
hearts from atheisms and fears.?° 


But there is one more contribution besides the 
gift of unselfish meaning, which Christianity has to 
make to the practical solution of the problem. It 
is the contribution of fellowship. ‘There is,” says 
W. E. Hocking, ‘‘only one situation in life when pain 
seems utterly unendurable: Namely, when van- 


20 William James, The Will to Believe, pp. 56, 61. 





THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 207 


quished, dishonored, and abandoned, the wretch must 
gasp out his life in utter solitude.” It may be added 
that in the greater literary portrayals of tragedy 
the otherwise unbearable tension is often lessened 
by some touch of comradeship. So the loyalty of 
the unconsidered pastry-cook, Rageneau, relieves 
the darkness of the closing scenes in Cyrano de 
Bergerac. It is much to us that old Peyrol in 
Conrad’s The Rover dies with his sacrifice com- 
prehended by those whom he leaves behind. And 
where the Christian Church functions as a living 
brotherhood—and how else can it function at all?— 
the distress or disaster of the individual is at once 
caught up into a circle of redeeming and mitigating 
influences that go far towards lessening the burden 
of the individual. There is healing power in fellow- 
ship when it is real, in friendship when it is un- 
feigned, in sympathy when it is sincere enough to 
mean “suffering with.” And a Christian community 
which has lost the power to supply these things to 
its members has forgotten the meaning of the words, 
“Bear ye one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law 
of Christ.” 

But religion opens the way to a yet wider and 
deeper fellowship of suffering. And it is not a fellow- 
ship with One who sits afar in Heaven and watches 
the long agony and effort of the earth unroll itself 
before him. ‘The theologians,” Dr. Fairbairn has 
said, ‘‘never made a greater mistake than when they 
sought to magnify God’s greatness by placing Him 
above the battle.”” The sources of that thought are, 
indeed, Greek, not Hebrew; it is to be traced to 


208 SHARING IN CREATION 


Neo-Platonic philosophy, not to the teaching of 
Jesus. It is not so that we are to think of the God 
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Father he is, 
and not a passionless Absolute; and if Father, then 
involved in all the life of the world. If there be, 
indeed, joy in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth, 
there must be sorrow over one man gone astray. The 
enterprise of creation could not but lay its Author 
open, in love and sympathy, to all that is undergone 
and endured by the work of his hands. It must be 
so always with every worker who has living creatures 
for his work. Who is weak and he is not weak? 
Who is caused to stumble and he burns not? Perhaps 
the only person who bears the full burden of the 
world is God. 

Nor have they been borne only by way of 
sympathy. ‘‘He spared not his own son.” The 
life of Jesus Christ is for Christians an active and 
personal entrance of God into the very inmost secrets 
of human agony—in Gethsemane, in the judgment 
hall of Pilate, on Calvary. Surely he hath borne 
our griefs and carried our sorrows. And if Jesus 
be, in truth, what St. Paul called him, ‘‘the portrait 
of the invisible God,” then the Cross is not only an 
earthly event but also the revelation of a continuing 
experience in God’s life. And the last word of God 
to the man upon whom some stroke of life has fallen 
is an appeal not to recoil from sharing in that which 
belongs to the life divine: ‘Are ye able to drink of 
the cup that I drink of?” And the last answer of 
men must be the answer of religious loyalty: ‘“We 
are able.” 


THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 209 


V 
THE TRANSMUTATION OF SUFFERING 


Such a view as this does not, it must be ad- 
mitted, enable us at present to make a detailed 
interpretation of every untoward event that happens 
in the world. At most it puts some reason into the 
hardness of life, helps us see that it is the outworking 
of a principle, not just a sort of cosmic bad weather, 
and enables us to understand that it may be—as, 
indeed, it must be—of the appointment of God, 
and yet lose nothing of our rational faith in His 
wisdom, His goodness, His power, or His love for 
men. 

Nor does it follow as a necessary conclusion 
that every ill-fortune that comes upon us is, in any 
immediate sense, the ‘‘act of God.’ Certainly the 
possibility of the worst that nature or man can do 
to us must always have been held within the scope 
of the divine knowledge and so be ultimately of 
the divine will. But particular evils can only be 
said to be willed “‘consequently,”’ as the unescapable 
features of what ‘“‘as a whole is good because it is 
indispensable to the attainment of the highest 
good.”’ The general who organizes the battle and 
the victory does not will the death of the particular 
soldier on outpost duty; perhaps no one wills it, 
not even the enemy; it may be the result of a stray 
bullet blindly fired from far behind the lines, like 
the legendary arrow, shot into the air, that slew 
Harold on Hastings Field. General Lee at the 
Battle of Fredericksburg met his youngest son, 
powder-begrimed. He might have stopped the 


210 SHARING IN CREATION 


battle or ordered the son to the rear—of course, with 
certain consequences. He had power to do either. 
He did neither, but gave him the news from home 
and passed on. Had that young man been killed 
some might have called Lee the slayer of his son. 
But most fathers would have understood. So, as 
was said in an earlier lecture, purpose may be the 
constitutive element in a whole series, and yet not 
every event in the series need be the direct expression 
of the purpose that governs the whole. 

And so it seems actually to be with our world. 
It seems to be a world with a good deal of play 
between its various parts, a world orderly and yet 
not so organized that every event in it necessarily 
furthers at once its central purpose; a world with 
room for chance and accident, for experiments wise 
and foolish. It seems, in a word, a world in the 
making, not a world made. And it is just this 
unfinished quality in the world, it is just the presence 
in it of elements not yet fully wrought upon by 
rational purpose, that gives to life its special quality. 
It is the incompleteness of the world that makes 
room for creative effort, for creative loyalty, for 
creative faith, that makes life, in short, an enter- 
prise rather than an accomplished fact. But it 
makes room also for accident. Chance and accident 
are words in our daily vocabulary; they express a 
natural human judgment upon one aspect of things; 
and there is no reason to suppose that our normal 
view is not the correct one. The religious man, it 
is true, sometimes seeks to find a meaning in each 
painful experience of his life by understanding it 
as the chastisement of God—for the one thing that 


THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 211 


would make pain unbearably tragic were that it 
should be meaningless. But we may, perhaps, come 
to feel that such need of meaning is taken care of 
in the larger considerations that we have been 
exploring. Moreover, such direct reference to God 
of each and every disaster is a two-edged sword. 
Where one man finds in it a crumb of comfort, 
another finds in it a reason for irreligion and despair. 
And there are extreme cases which we can refer 
directly-to God only by refusing to visualize them. 

Let me recur to an illustration already suggested. 
We know that the wise father may love his son 
above all earthly things and yet refuse to shut him 
away from the world of danger and strain. He 
will certainly use every possible precaution and throw 
out every possible safeguard (and what is such 
family care but itself a safeguard that God has 
sought to throw around the beginnings of the lives 
of his littlest children?). But the father knows 
that in the last resort the son must learn to play 
his part in the chancy business of life, taking risks, 
meeting emergencies, failing and recovering from 
failure, retrieving disaster. And if accident comes, 
it zs accident—accident to father no less than to 
son—and yet accident within a larger purpose. So 
it may be with Him whom we have been taught to 
call the Father of all mankind. We have the authority 
of Jesus for regarding the analogy of father and 
son as the best illustration of the divine-human 
relation. And what we call accidents may often 
be real accidents—in God’s' sight as well as in ours. 
The untimely cutting off of a life may check for a 
time the realization of a purpose of God for it, as 


212 SHARING IN CREATION 


well as break the dreams of those who gave it birth. 
God Himself may find it necessary again and again 
to deal creatively with new situations and adjust 
the unchanging purpose to meet fresh emergencies. 
And the tears of a mother for her first-born may have 
their high analogue in the life of one who is afflicted 
in all our afflictions, ‘‘who doth not willingly grieve 
the children of men.’”’ Human sorrow may often 
be in the most literal sense sorrow shared with God. 
Nor is this a mere speculation but rather the sober 
teaching of what we know of our world and of 
God in relation with us. The incredible speculation 
were rather that in the face of human distress God 


should be unmoved. And surely the paradoxical © 


instinct of religion is right when we turn, in the 
hour of need, for sympathy and for rescue to God 
from whose creative action all pain ultimately 
derives. 

For sympathy and for rescue. For if the 
Christian view of the world be true, there is no 
accident that is irremediable and no disaster that 
is irretrievable. The future belongs to God, and, 
through God, to us, and no story is a finished story 
until the creative enterprise is complete. And the 
most tragic event may be taken up into the un- 
changing purpose of God, creatively dealt with, and 
so transmuted into good. For the life that never 
had the opportunity to live 


God has more green gardens in his care 
And more stars in his sky, 


and no purpose of his or ours need finally fail save 
through our failure to work with Him. Surely the 


THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 213 


ideal towards which we should work is just this— 
that we, in full alliance with God, should meet 
constructively and creatively each situation as it 
arises, be it good or bad, in such a fashion as to 
make it forward the purpose of the world. God is 
not only Creator but Redeemer, and in the redemp- 
tion of disastrous event would have our co-operation. 
And if and as we give it, the strange alchemy of 
religion may do its work, the very causes of doubt 
may be transformed into the material of faith, the 
sick heart may awake to new hope, and the occasion 
of suffering may be transmuted into a call for a 
spiritual enterprise. 

That we, under the guidance and held within 
the sympathy of God, should find a way to work the 
worst over into the best, this were the transmutation 
of suffering; and such transmutation is, indeed, 
“‘no far-off theological mystery but, God be thanked, 
the very texture of our human experience.’’?! 

Thus it is true profoundly and exactly that, 
as some of the ancient authorities record the saying 
of St. Paul, “To them that love God, God worketh 
all things with them for good.’’2 And by such 
working of God with us, and of us with God, the life 
of time may bear its proper fruit in characters that 
God may use, in ways at present unguessable by 
us, in the far reaches of eternity. It may be that 
by such transmutation of suffering we shall finally 
outgrow the need of enforced endurance. But we 
can outgrow it only by growing up into a readiness 
voluntarily to undertake tasks that involve enter- 


21 Pringle-Pattison, Idea of God, p. 417. 
22 Rom, vili.28. 





214 SHARING IN CREATION 


prise, effort, perhaps even pain. And so the war on 
suffering, which we carry on with some success 
nowadays, is right, provided it is also and at the 
same time a war on softness, laziness, lack of spiritual 
ambition. We can safely tone down the rigors of 
life only as we succeed in toning up the quality of 
life. Any Heaven that is the place of the happy 
must also be the place of the strong. But even 
when the fruits of life on the earth have been fully 
gathered, there can be no certainty, in a universe 
that contains the cross of Christ, that the most 
blessed life may not, for love’s sake, be called upon 
again to endure. For the Heaven which sent Jesus 
into the world, can not have for its fundamental 
feature liberty for private indulgence but rather 
readiness to serve. 

To ask whether the world is a good world or a 
bad world is after all a meaningless question. It 
is good if we make it good; it is bad if we make it 
bad. It is we ourselves who transmute the raw 
material of life into optimism and pessimism. The 
final outcome for St. Paul is optimism—‘‘Thrice was 
I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I 
suffered shipwreck, a night and a day have I been 
in the deep . . . . in watchings often, in hunger 
and thirst, in cold and nakedness.”’ ‘But I rejoice 
in the Lord greatly . . . . for I have learned in 
whatsoever state I am therein to be content. I 
know how to be abased, and I know how to abound; 
in everything and in all things I have learned the 
secret both to be filled and to be hungry, both to 
abound and to be in want. I can do all things in 


THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 215 


him that strengthens me.’’2? Pessimism is the 
outcome for Schopenhauer, philosopher and ‘sen- 
sualist, never allowing any serious blast of ill-fortune 
to touch him, fleeing from Berlin when it was 
endangered by the war in 1813, fleeing again when 
the cholera visited the city in 1831. We make in 
part our own world, and what our world shall be 
like depends upon our power to make full use of 
life’s joys and to transmute its difficulties into food 
for the soul. | 

In the realm of historic religion there have 
been two great solutions offered for the problem set 
by suffering, one by Buddhism, the other by Chris- 
tianity. Both religions have fully recognized the 
reality and magnitude of the painful quality in life, 
but the solutions proposed are precisely opposite to 
each other. To the founder of Buddhism suffering 
was so nearly the whole of life that other aspects 
could be safely neglected. ‘Birth,’ he is reported 
to have said in one of his sermons, ‘“‘is suffering, 
old age is suffering, death is suffering, association 
with the unloved is suffering, separation from the 
loved is suffering.’”’ And since suffering is so allied 
with life, increase of life only breeds more suffering. 
To desire goods, to strive after earthly ideals, to 
possess friends, to love and to be loved, to marry 
and to be the father of sons—all this is but to lay 
oneself open to strokes of disaster certain sooner or 
later to fall. And, since life is inseparable from 
suffering, it follows that life itself stands condemned 
as not worth living. It is therefore a thing to be 
fled, to be escaped from by the patient suppression 

% JI Cor. xi.25 seq.; Phil. iv.10 seq. 





216 SHARING IN CREATION 


of every desire and every need and the cutting of 
every human tie that fastens a man to existence, 
until finally the will-to-live dies down and a way is 
found into Nirvana, which is the final and unbreak- 
able peace of having ceased to live. For whatever 
be the exact meaning of Nirvana, it is at least 
the end of all that activity of thought, feeling, and 
will that we call life. For the Buddha himself, it 
probably also meant total extinction. ‘As a flame, 
blown by the wind, goes out and can not be re- 
kindled,’ he said, ‘“‘so a wise man, delivered from 
name and body, disappears and can not be reckoned 
as existing.’”’ So the Wheel of Life may be cheated 
of its prey and man be delivered from the disease 
of living. So is born the religion that, whatever its 
later transfotfmations and values, has always at its 
heart the defeatist theory of escape from life. And 
in its temples throughout the East sits the figure 
of Buddha, passionless, incurious, immobile, with 
arms folded upon breast, done with life. 
Christianity, the other great religious attempt 
to deal with the problem, begins by recognizing the 
same grim facts. But it would mitigate them by 
recognizing the presence of other qualifying facts— 
if birth means pain it also means joy, and if death 
means suffering it may also be found to mean rebirth 
into deeper joy. And so far from looking upon 
suffering as dominant, it would regard the essential 
rhythm of life as built of major rather than of minor 
chords. And the pain that is in life is to be taken 
as a challenge to creative effort rather than as a 
summons to surrender. The Christian appeal is 
not to cease living because of pain but to live ever 


_ THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 217 


more abundantly, counting the end worth the risk, 
the gain worth the price that must be paid. Chris- 
tianity points also to the experimental transmutation 
of suffering into material for life, and holds out the 
hope that such transmutation, if we can master its 
secret, will carry yet larger consequences in life 
beyond this world. The goal of life is eternal life, 
and, possessing it, Christian men shall not be over- 
sorry that they “have fought with beasts at 
Ephesus’—may perhaps even remember, as old 
soldiers remember, with a certain pride the bitter 
day when, with brain and heart at utmost strain, 
we helped, if indeed by God’s grace we were able, to 
hold steady and unbroken the sorely tried ranks of 
man. And in the Christian temples one sees repeated 
over and over again two scenes. The one is the 
figure of a crucified Man; the other is the same 
figure, but now it is the likeness of a Risen One, 
triumphant over pain. 
The Christian call is neither to avoidance nor 

to acquiescence but to victory. 

Make Beauty and make Rest give place, 

Mock Prudence loud—and she is gone, 

Smite satisfaction on the face, 

And tread the ghost of Ease upon. 

Light-lipped and singing press we hard 

Over old earth which now is worn, 

Triumphant, buffeted and scarred, 


By billows howled at, tempest torn, 
Towards blue horizons far away. 


CONCLUSION 
CREATION AND RELIGION 


There are two widely different types of religion 
with which history has made us familiar. In the 
first, the religious life is undertaken as a means of 
escape from the world. Such religion is essentially 
other-worldly. Its God is a God wholly beyond 
and outside the earth, too great to be directly related 
with it; its goal is attained when a world well lost 
drops away behind us. That goal may be reached 
through actual ascetic flight from life or by the 
psychological road of a perfect inward detachment 
from it, a detachment the outcome of which is a 
peace won by stopping the ears to all harsh or un- 
pleasant sounds. But the peace is only a cloistered 
peace, and therefore unstable, liable to be whelmed 
by some irresistible incursion of the world that roars 
just outside the close-shut door. 

Moreover that is not a worthy peace which is 
won by exclusion of difficult facts. A religious 
peace is worthy and may hope to make itself per- 
manent only as it labors to change the facts so that 
the outward reality corresponds to the inward desire. 
So far as Christian history is concerned it was prob- 
ably in the later Middle Ages that the ideal of re- 
ligion as a form of spiritual flight was most generally 
accepted. The pursuit of that ideal bred types of 

218 


CONCLUSION 219 


striking personal saintliness, and it was often found 
not to be inconsistent with the effort to render certain 
services to mankind. But the general effect was to 
withhold men from taking the tasks of life overser- 
iously; the Medieval Church waited for a better 
world more than it sought to make this world better; 
and the peace of the monasteries was shattered in 
the storms of the Renaissance and the Reformation. 
Lord Bryce has written of this period that, “‘At no 
time in the world’s history has theory, pretending 
all the while to control practice, been so utterly 
divorced from it. Ferocious and sensual, that age 
worshipped humility and asceticism; there has 
never been a purer ideal of love, nor a grosser 
profligacy of life.’’? 

But there is another type which sees the world 
as a great theatre of God’s creative and redeeming 
action. And for it the world is not a thing to be 
dismissed as a failure but rather a thing to be made 
and to be saved. Religion of this sort has its natural 
roots in the discovery of God as the Creator of the 
world of things and men. Religion itself is the 
expression of a profoundly natural relation between 
us and God; it is born of the recognition that “‘it 
is He that hath made us and not we ourselves; we 
are his people and the sheep of His pasture.’’ He, 
it is who has called us out of the elemental dark 
where there is no created thing and given us the 
chance of living and loving and working on the earth. 
And when we so dwell in thought upon the origin 
of lives that we account worth living, it is strange 
if our hearts do not warm a little towards the Life 


1 Holy Roman Empire, p. 111. 





220 SHARING IN CREATION 


that gave us life; strange if there does not waken in 
us that Godward movement of the soul which is 
religion. ‘This is what Herder had in mind when he 
said that “‘the thought of the Creator of the world 
is the most fruitful of all ideas in human life.” 
Through this knowledge, indeed, we find that we are 
not masterless men, mere free lances in the world, 
but members of a spiritual family. We have a 
Father in Heaven. . And religion is just the response 
of the soul to the discovery of that relationship. 
It is fealty to the Lord of the kingdom of spirit; it 
is loyalty to the Head of the House of Man. 

The conception of religion as personal loyalty 
and devotion is clearly traceable in all the higher 
religions. We can see it very clearly in the Hindu 
Bakhti movement, the personal-religion movement 
of modern India. It reappears in Japanese sectarian 
Buddhism with its principle of devotion to some one 
of the Buddhas of mythology, Maitreya or Amida. 
And it has in these cases a certain reality, if it be only 
. the reality of devotion to a personalized ideal of God. 
But the principle receives a new sort of reality in 
Christianity. For here the soul’s religious loyalty 
is focussed and given a new precision through the 
historic personality of Jesus. In relating itself to 
God through Jesus Christ our Lord, devotion finds 
itself in contact with the concrete, the historical, 
the vividly’ personal. And this means that the 
loyalty will be educated and trained by its object. 
For in Christianity the Object is not an ideal that 
we make—however much truth such an ideal might 
have in it—but a Personality that we find in history. 
And that Personality has a definite, objective, 


CONCLUSION 221 


determinate character of his own. Hence religious 
growth under his influence becomes less the evolu- 
tion of religion and more the education of religion. 
Christians are not just men who believe in religious 
loyalty; Jesus demands a certain sort of loyalty, 
a certain kind of devotion. It must be more than 
a mystical emotion; it must be undergirded by active 
righteousness. And to be a Christian is to seek to 
find God through his revelation, and pursue life under 
his guidance, and live for the ends to which he gave 
himself, 

| But if this be Christianity at its best, then we 
have found what must be the deepest expression of 
religious loyalty. It is service, and religion itself 
is just loyalty to God expressed in service. For the 
God whom Jesus brings us is not primarily the 
Great Autocrat who desires only perpetual adora- 
tion. He is the Great Servant who desires helpers. 
He is a God who seeks ends, pursues purposes, 
works out a plan. We have, indeed, seen God in 
action—and lo, he was in the midst of us as one that 
served. And religion as adoration and religion as 
work are fused into an indissoluble unity in the 
saying of Jesus, ‘““Thou shalt worship the Lord thy 
God and him only shalt thou serve.” 

It is, indeed, religion that makes possible the 
conversion of creation into a co-operative enterprise. 
There was much creative work done, it is true, before 
man was born, but the enterprise of life was, so far, 
unconscious of the ends towards which it moved. 
The animals were as servants that knew not what 
their lord did. But with the birth of man there 
came the possibility of conscious recognition of 


222 SHARING IN CREATION 


God’s purposes and of deliberate co-operation with 
them. And then—‘“‘No longer do I call you servants 
. but I have called you friends.” ‘“‘Ye are 
my friends if ye do the things which I command 
you.’? In and through religion creation becomes 
aware of its Author; we have the sense of a great 
circuit closing as if an electric spark had leaped 
between earth and heaven. For religion, at its best, 
has power to bind God and man and men together 
into a true society in the unity of one Spirit, which 
is the Spirit of creative work for the highest ends. 
Apart from religion we tend to live as mere individ- 
uals, running hither and thither, getting our daily 
bread, stopping hastily to do casual kindnesses, 
heaping up possessions, as magpies gather bits of 
string and scraps of clothing, without knowing at all 
what we mean to do with them, pursuing innumer- 
able unrelated ends that lead no whither. Or else 
we coalesce haphazard into groups that find in their 
conflicting purposes reasons for bitter antagonisms. 
Religion, if we could but find the way to give free 
scope to it, has power to change all this. For 
it has in it the power to organize and confederate 
humanity into the service of an enterprise in which no 
man’s blessing need be any man’s hurt, in which 
every man’s self-realization is also a gift towards the 
fulfillment of all. In the Kingdom of God the only 
power that is recognized is the power to serve. ‘“‘He 
that is greatest among you shall be your servant.” 
‘He that is master of all shall be servant of all.” 
We seem to reach here, too, the theoretic 
solution of a spiritual problem which has been 


2St. John xv.14-15, 





CONCLUSION 223 


shadowed forth again and again in the history of 
religion. The better sort of men have always desired 
and sought to find in religion a means of escape from 
the torments and weakness of self-centeredness and 
self-consideration. They have seen that there can 
be no real joy in living so long as our universe 
revolves around ourselves—so long as we value 
experience only by the way in which at the moment 
it affects ourselves. But deliverance has been 
sought in various ways; sometimes through a mystic 
fusion with the Divine in which the soul loses its 
own individuality; sometimes, as in early Buddhism, 
through a self-suppression that has self-obliteration 
for its end. Christianity, too, offers a deliverance, 
but it is a deliverance not from selfhood but from 
selfishness. There has been a mistake in under- 
standing the cause of the trouble. It is not selfhood 
that is the disease of life, as the East has tended to 
think, but selfishness that is the disease of selfhood. 
And so the Christian ideal is not that of suppressing 
life but of releasing it from its subjective diseases 
and inhibitions by winning it to the healthy service 
of causes so vast and so worthy and so interesting 
that in their presence self-concentration becomes an 
absurdity. In the service of these causes there lies 
the possibility of a self-forgetfulness which is also 
self-conservation. For the giving of one’s life to a 
great end is also the life’s fulfillment and ennobling. 
Therefore, said Jesus, “‘Whosoever will save his own 
life shall lose it and whosoever will lose his life for 
my sake shall find it.” 

Furthermore, there is to be found in the service 
of these causes the gift of power. There is much 


224 SHARING IN CREATION 


talk nowadays of the release of power and how to 
compass it, the suggestion being that we have endless 
reserves within ourselves if we can only learn how to 
tap them. And we probe anxiously the inner recesses 
of our being with various psychological instruments, 
hoping to touch the secret spring. There is power 
to be released by exploiting the unconscious—various 
sorts of power, it is to be feared; there is power 
through repose—but how best to win repose? There 
is reason for thinking that this search for power by 
looking within ourselves has been somewhat over- 
done. Over-indulgence in it breeds too much the 
self-considering attitude and the inward-turning eye. 
And to psychologize oneself into the conviction that 
one is very strong indeed, may only be to create 
delusions of grandeur which are not warranted by 
the facts. Every community has in it those who 
have won the sense of power by methods merely 
psychological, but the ignorant and unlearned do 
not as a rule properly value the feat and are likely 
to say only that “they think too well of themselves.” 
One hears, too, of the “therapeutic value of the 
religious attitude;’ and while such an approach 
may have real value, in the hands of wise men, who 
know what religion is, many crude efforts at assuming 
such an “attitude” strike one as no more than 
attempts to secure the benefits of belief without 
paying the price of believing. Ours is the age of 
psychology, among other things, and there is great 
danger that men should come to conceive religion 
as a merely subjective affection, a sort of healthy 
state of mind. It is as if one sought to raise the 
baby on dietetics instead of milk. It is as if men 


CONCLUSION 225 


asked for God and we were able to give them only— 
psychology. 

For, indeed, religion is not only an attitude but 
a conviction, and he who “‘gets”’ religion only to get 
well has not yet got religion. It is not just a state 
of mind but a relation with objective reality, and 
the moment it should discover itself to have only 
‘psychologic’ value, even that value would be lost. 
We possess religion not by having a psychology of 
ourselves, but by having beliefs about the world— 
not by believing that religion is good for us but only 
by having faith in God. And its power resides in 
the fact that it relates us objectively to a Power 
beyond ourselves and to ends wider and more far- 
reaching than our own. Psychology can only 
describe the mental channels along which power 
travels, and, perhaps, help to remove obstructions 
that block its flow. The sources of power are not 
to be reached through psychological manipulations 
but only through uniting ourselves in prayer and 
action to God. The soldier’s steady and permanent 
courage does not come of repeating endlessly the 
words, “I am brave.’’ This, indeed, is character- 
istically done by those who habitually run away. 
It comes rather through remembering the worth 
of the cause for which he fights. And one wins 
power directly and permanently, not by trying to 
lift oneself by one’s bootstraps but by hitching 
one’s wagon to a star. 

There is no auto-suggestion comparable to the 
suggestion of reality; no self-induced states so stable 
as those induced by contact with it. The securest 
health is born of the outward rather than of the 


226 SHARING IN CREATION 


inward look, and the highest power comes only 
through making connection with the highest real. 
Even a small machine can become a focus of a large 
amount of energy through its connection with a 
big dynamo. And a limited personality can become 
a center for the release of immense power when it 
passes under the control of an overmastering ideal. 
A man is enlarged—or contracted—by the cause 
that he serves, be it the cause of getting forward 
the world’s life or only that of securing his own 
well-being. The men who have helped the world 
forward have not been supermen—indeed, current 
biography is much employed in exposing their weak- 
nesses, finding ‘‘not Launcelot brave nor Galahad 
pure.” Their power came of their relations and of 
their loyalties. ‘I can do all things,” wrote St. 
Paul, ‘“‘through Christ who strengthens me:”’ and 
again, of the gospel of Christ, “it is the power of 
God unto salvation to every one that believeth.” 
Nor can any man desire for himself any greater 
endowment than this: that he should be captured 
by the personality of Jesus and become completely 
the servant of the purposes that he embodied. For 
this were to find the power to work unflaggingly for 
ends worthy of the utmost devotion, the power to 
remain undefeated in disappointment or disaster, the 
power to keep one’s poise in the midst of conflict, 
the power to stand loyal in the hour of strain. 
And these are the only powers with the winning of 
which any man need concern himself. All else that 
he needs will be gradually conferred upon him by 
the experience of life in the world with God. 

There can be no greater mistake on the part 


CONCLUSION 227 


of those who are specially charged with the culture 
of religion than that of submitting to the vulgar 
and debasing, yet subtly prevalent, conception of it 
as a device by which the individual may escape 
certain pains and win an assured ease. Religion 
must be great enough to command man before it 
can win him. Its real victories come not by offering 
man sweets—even though they be the sweets of 
Paradise—but by claiming him for tasks and ambi- 
tions worth the gift of a life. Of these surely there 
is in our world no lack. The scope and dignity of 
its processes and the value of its ends have grown 
to our eyes with the growth of knowledge. We are 
as those first adventurers to these shores who 
thought that they had discovered an island and 
found that a continent awaited their exploration 
and their conquest. Servants are we of an under- 
taking vaster than we knew; partners, by grace of 
God, in a great enterprise. 












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